There could not have been a more striking week for Salman Rushdie to discuss how his life changed after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa on him for writing The Satanic Verses than this one. His piece in The New Yorker is written in the third person, which makes sense as a way of examining events that must have been so disassociating that I can imagine it seemed impossible to Rushdie that they were happening to him. And it is a powerful articulation not just of how profound and real the threats can be against people who articulate ideas that fundamentalists find—or pronounce, anyway—abhorrent, but of how these kinds of disasters come to pass, and the dreadful alchemy ideas are subject to when they do.

“Where Americans prize individual choice, Egyptians put a greater emphasis on the rights of communities, families and religious groups,” David Kirkpatrick, Helene Cooper, and Mark Landler wrote in the New York Times today, explaining President Obama’s calls to Egypt in an effort to control the spreading protests at American embassies. And Rushdie writes about attempting to navigate some of those values in his own life as he tried to evade the fatwa: “Yes, we should be conscious of the sensibilities of others, but that did not mean we should surrender to them,” Rushdie writes as the thing he wanted to say when he issued his public statement, on the advice of the British government, after he went into hiding. But this is the crux of the problem that the Times reporters articulated. How do we forge an agreement when one party to a negotiation is demanding the right never to be offended and the other is demanding the right to speak and to be read seriously and thoughtfully?

“The British edition of ‘The Satanic Verses’ came out on Monday, September 26, 1988, and, for a brief moment that fall, the publication was a literary event, discussed in the language of books,” Rushdie reminisces. “Soon enough, the language of literature would be drowned in the cacophony of other discourses—political, religious, sociological, postcolonial—and the subject of quality, of artistic intent, would come to seem almost frivolous.” As much as the right to write and to speak, Rushdie’s Personal History here is about the need for both sides in these conversations to be equally engaged. Just as it’s tragic that the people who pronounced a fatwa against Rushdie failed to read his respect for Muhammad’s repudiation of the Satanic Verses, or to recognize that the insults against Muslims in the novel are spoken by villains rather than heroes, it’s infuriating that the people protesting against Innocence of Muslims, the crude trailer for an unfinished film, produced in a way that deceived even the people who were acting in it, are refusing to consider the film’s utter irrelevance in measuring their anger. If only the people who riot against books and movies, who bomb libraries and attack diplomats, would read them and watch them.

Salman Rushdie and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the force behind Innocence of Muslims, are very different men. The former is an artist, the later a check-kiter, a meth cook, a fraud. And the thing that divides them most is their intentions. “It did not strike his opponents as strange that a serious writer should spend a tenth of his life creating something as crude as an insult,” Rushdie writes of the frustration of watching the reality of his novel sink under the waters of public conversation. “This was because they refused to see him as a serious writer. In order to attack him and his work, they had to paint him as a bad person, an apostate traitor, an unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, an opportunist who ‘attacked Islam” for his own personal gain’…He did it for money. He did it for fame. The Jews made him do it. Nobody would have bought his unreadable book if he hadn’t vilified Islam. That was the nature of the attack, and so for many years ‘The Satanic Verses’ was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. And he became the Insulter, not only in Muslim eyes but in the opinion of the public at large.”

Nakoula is, to a certain extent, the thing that Rushdie was accused of being. He described his film as explicitly political—its intent was to provoke, though I doubt whether it will be judged to have met the threshold for inciting violence. A Coptic Christian, he initially presented himself as Israeli and the film as financed by Israeli backers, perpetrating the kind of lie of a Jewish conspiracy to insult Islam Rushdie was accused of being part of. And while, as Rushdie says of his novel in the wake of the fatawa, “the subject of quality, of artistic intent, would come to seem almost frivolous,” it remains relevant here, if only because it is emotionally easier to defend a man like Rushdie than it is to defend a man like Nakoula. The truth, though, is that we must accept the possibility of Nakoulas if we are to have our Rushdies. The challenge, as it was in 1989, is whether it’s ever possible to explain to people who accept the existence of neither why we value the latter enough to tolerate the former.

The bridge is yours.

-Tom Hanks squares off with the Nazis.

-Wikipedia’s gender bias.

-Why is it so hard to make television shows set at colleges?

-Grantland talks to Issa Rae.

It seems like the leaking of nude photos of famous women has become a routine occurrence, a perhaps-inevitable consequence of the social media age and human error. But the publications of two sets of topless photographs of celebrities this week, a phone camera photo actress Alison Pill intended for her fiance, Jay Baruchel but accidentally tweeted publicly, and a set of paparazzi shots of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, illustrate that while we may have come to expect to see women in public life naked, we’re a long way for establishing where the zones of privacy lie—and how far we should go to enforce them.

When Pill accidentally Tweeted out a playful picture of herself topless in bed, she apologized, but didn’t agonize. “Yep. That picture happened,” she tweeted. “Ugh. My tech issues have now reached new heights, apparently.” Baruchel added “My fiancee is an hilarious dork. #imustjgladitdidnthappentomefirst…Smartphones will get ya.” Pill may be embarrassed, but both she and Baruchel seem to have accepted that her mistake is the kind of inevitable risk people take when they distribute intimate shots of themselves on pieces of technology that are perhaps too powerful for our own good. Nobody’s suing. Nobody’s outraged. It may not have been tasteful for news outlets to publish the picture after Pill released it, but no one suggested it was a gross violation of privacy for them to do so, or that the photograph itself tarnished her reputation.

By contrast, the pictures of Kate Middleton sunbathing that the French magazine Closer published weren’t taken by her and leaked, or hacked, accidentally tweeted, or as was the case with pictures of her brother-in-law, Prince Harry, naked after a game of strip pool, taken by so-called friends and sold. They were taken by paparazzi photographers. Closer maintains that Prince William and his wife were on a balcony that was visible from the street, though “full view of a public road” may mean rather different things to the naked eye and to one enhanced by an extremely long-range telephoto lens.

While strict British press laws have generally protected the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge from the publication of photos of them in private moments at home, Closer apparently felt secure enough in its interpretation of French privacy laws to print the pictures, though it may face a suit from the royal family. But individual countries’ speech, publication, and privacy laws mean much less in the age of the internet, and while Afghanistan may demand that YouTube be blocked in response to the anti-Islam video that’s contributed to protests in a number of Middle Eastern countries, privacy violations are hardly likely to spark similar complains. It’s not just the internet—camera technology, be it embedded in smartphones or available to enhance a DSLR body, makes the terms of existing law up for debate.

That gets at a larger issue. Press and privacy laws, whether we think they’re desirable or not, function less to prevent the publication of the images of famous people than to help establish the market for them. When celebrities sue magazines and newspapers that print images like the ones of Middleton, the speed with which they act and the damages they request set precedents that help publications calculate whether it’s worth it to run the pictures, whether they can sell enough copies and garner enough clicks to make the cost of the pictures and the cost of the damages worth it. But those laws don’t, and never have, curbed the efforts of professionals to get pictures of famous women or of amateurs to sell them, and they certainly can’t protect us from mistakes in handling the photos we take of ourselves. Alison Pill will probably take better care with her camera phone in the future, and the leak may dispel whatever curiosity existed about what she looks like naked. But Kate Middleton has a bigger problem: it’s one thing to try to affect the supply of pictures of her, when the conversation about demand is the one that we’ve always needed, and that we’ll never meaningfully be able to have.

The thing that strikes me most about the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is how quiet the President is for much of it. There’s a kindness, almost, to the delivery of the Gettysburg Address, a tentativeness to the question, “Shall we stop this blood?”

In a way, watching this reminded me of Michael Lewis’s profile of President Obama in Vanity Fair, which emphasizes both the essential aloneness of the presidency even as the person who occupies it faces constant emotional demands. Obama told Lewis:

“You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

In the profile, as in the trailer, the president is surrounded by competing voices, but ultimately required to decide alone. The wars are different. The job—and the federal government—have gotten bigger, in part because of what the war Lincoln oversaw taught the country about what it needed, particularly in a time of conflict. But the essential nature of the role remains very much the same.