Discovering a point of agreement with a colleague is always alarming. The Atlantic wants more readers rather than fewer, after all, and agreement is poisonous for a subscription base, just as it is for intellectual culture. But here we are: Adam Serwer, in a counterargument to Caitlin Flanagan’s essay and my essay after last month’s attack on Salman Rushdie, agrees that the attack was ghastly and an assault on free speech. Luckily he disagrees with us on everything else, in particular the association Flanagan and I drew between censorious attitudes in the United States and the rather more lethal censoriousness in Iran.
