I can certainly sympathize with writers who don't want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

Some 2,800 Americans went to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], and it was, by far, the largest number of Americans before or since who've ever joined somebody else's civil war. I think they were primarily people who were deeply alarmed by the menace of fascism. They saw this on the horizon. I quote one volunteer, Maury Colow of New York, who said, "for us it was never Franco, it was always Hitler."