Author Salman Rushdie: 'Joseph Anton,' Fatwas and Freedom

Salman Rushdie is best known as the author of The Satanic Verses, a book that resulted in the declaration of a fatwa against him by Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. Rushdie was subsequently placed under protective custody for years due to threats of violence against him, as well as the murder of the book’s Japanese translator and the firebombing of bookstores.

His newest book, Joseph Anton, recounts his years in hiding, and takes its name from the alias he used during that period.

On September 17, stated attended a reading by Rushdie at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York, where he shared several notable observations on religion and his time in hiding. Here are just a few…

• “If you can avoid being condemned to death by the tyrannical leader of a foreign country, I recommend doing so.”


• “If you’re a satirical writer, it’s much easier to know what you’re against then what you are for. It’s one of the great gifts that period [of hiding] gave me. It taught me what I was for. Freedom.”


• “The relationship between man and God is complicated, because man actually exists. That gives man the edge.”

Artist Hazel Dooney: 'Discomfort the Viewer, Not Turn Them On'

stated interviewed artist Hazel Dooney almost two years ago during a period in her life she describes in a post on her blog:

This is my story of the past three years: I went mad. I went bankrupt. My father died from a particularly aggressive cancer. I went mad again, and not just from grief. I stopped painting. I fell ill. I recovered. I started painting again.

Since we spoke with her she has revealed the story of her youth in a difficult-to-read blog post, admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital for a month of treatment, and regained her health. And despite her struggles, she is one of the top 50 traded artists by value in the Australian and New Zealand markets. What is most notable is that she left the gallery system seven years ago, works hard to market her own work, sacrificed a key tool in marketing her own work by leaving Facebook on principle, and yet remains very much in the public eye.

Check out her TED Talk (below), but perhaps more interesting is this video interview with Australian newspaper, The Age.

'Coolness is Everywhere': Josh Rubin, Cool Hunting Founder

Back in 2003, Josh Rubin started Cool Hunting as a personal outlet to share inspirational content he found around the web. Today the site gets nearly 4 million page views per month and produces a lot of original style, design, and tech content.

We heard Josh speak at the Portable Curators Conference on the topic of curation and what is “cool.”

Defining and discussing what is “cool” is probably the least cool thing anyone can do. Any attempt to formulate a complete curatorial process to theorize on what cool is will often sound stiff, square—downright uncool. But Rubin’s open-ended analytical approach toward that exploration and discovery is most decidedly, if pragmatically, cool.

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