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

You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east. Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony. So people at the time really saw fascism not just as an evil but as an aggressive evil that seemed to be spreading.

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

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

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

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