We forget the conditions - not only in slavery - but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today's incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things. We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

There is no shortage of ways that people profit indirectly from the misery and cruelty in other places. Even now, the shirts we wear and the tomatoes we eat. There are unfortunately unfair and inhumane conditions - including literal slavery - all over the world.

I think it's a very stark marker of what kind of president we have that, from all available evidence, Donald Trump has not read a book, as an adult. This is not someone who sits down in the evening to consider the latest bestseller, let alone Tolstoy - but who is very very active on this medium that requires no discipline and no attention and no empathy. It is all about retweeting praise of oneself or very quickly or poorly considered, ill-typed, misspelled diatribes against other people.

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.

One thing we've learned about Donald Trump - this candidate first, president-elect, and now president - is that he has this sort of reptilian instinct for rooting out supposed enemies and finding people he can whip up distrust into rage.

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.