I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people's experiences.
It is really something, the extent to which we allow ourselves to live without thinking of things that we know, in the abstract, are bad, and are going on right now, somewhere far away. We think, "Well, what are you gonna do?" In a way, that little instinct, that "What are you gonna do?" is the most dangerous thing in the world.
The membrane between where we are right now and a very different reality, is so much thinner than we like to think. Things can go back, and things can go to the side, and things can go to places where we might not even have been on guard that they might go. I think that if there is a great gift that this [Donald Trump] election gave us, is this sort of sense of vigilance, the sense that we have to remain on guard. We have to support our free press.
It is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative journalism. We're seeing, there's no question, that we're seeing a renaissance of that.