Encountering Salman Rushdie

Writing yesterday about being in Lincoln Centre with Salman Rushdie prompted me to recall the other time, the very same week, we ended up in the same room.

Catherine was 4 months pregnant when, in the spring of 2000, we headed to New York City, along with brothers Mike and Steve, for the very first edition of The New Yorker Festival.

We had tickets to a variety of events, including an architecture bus tour with Paul Goldberger, a reading by Stephen King, and the aforementioned Robin Williams-Lillian Ross event at Lincoln Centre. 

My favourite event, however (and the most “New Yorkery”) was a panel discussion of science writers held at The Princeton Club. I first learned about it when I emailed Malcolm Gladwell to see if he was participating in and (it being 2000, a gentler time), he emailed back:

yes, i think i’m doing a panel discussion with a couple of other science writers on the saturday. but i haven’t seen the final agenda yet either.

The panel included Gladwell, Michael Specter, Jerome Groupman, and Atul Gawande: then and now a cross-section of the smartest science and medicine writers in the US.

When the well-attended panel was over, brother Steve and I, eager to get out the door to the next event on our agenda, ducked out the  back into a service hallway, walked through a maze of corridors, and emerged eventually into another meeting room. Where we encountered Salman Rushdie, just finishing up a panel discussion of his own.

Rushdie had reached a new level of openness by that time, and had moved to New York City that year, so it wasn’t as miraculous to encounter him by chance as it might seem. But, inashmuch as he’d been in hiding for more than a decade, it was still remarkable to just stumble out of a service hallway and come face to face with him.