“It is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.” –Bruce Springsteen cancels his 4/10/16 Greensboro, NC, show over HB2.

I am jealous of Paris and of Charlie Hebdo. The world mourns their losses and pledges to defend their freedoms, as it should. I only wish that St Louis . . . could have inspired a more perceptive cartoon to match its homegrown hybrid of Hebdo-Hoosier satire.

You will be told the death was staged: humans do not die that way, blood does not move like that, limbs do not separate from bodies so easily, headless bodies appear only in fantastic stories, children do not die, explosives do not sound like that . . .

For kids who grew up in the 90s in Burundi (like me), every day was pretty much consumed with war and the ethnic baggage it brought. Again, it’s not like any of us had a choice. We were born into it.

If you feel that you have so far lived your life unaffected by even the mildest form of sexism . . . and are treated with love and respect by every man in your life, then to you I say: I’m glad for you. If you don’t think you need feminism, then that is a victory for the movement.

My question for the six boycotters is this: if you cannot physically bear to sit in a room and show solidarity with people who have been murdered for drawing cartoons — murder being the most terminal form of censorship — then what is the point of belonging to PEN at all?