This panel discussion about whether writers have a political responsibility outside of writing brings together a group of authors with distinctly different life experiences and opinions on the subject, from the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, who had been imprisoned for a number of years in South Africa on trumped-up treason and terrorism charges, to Tatyana Tolstoya, the novelist, short story writer, and acerbic critic of contemporary Russian life, to Stanley Crouch, the American jazz critic, novelist, and essayist. But because the event is being held in the spring of 1994, a great deal of the focus of the evening is on the Bosnian war and the siege of Sarajevo, which David Rieff (another panel member) had experienced directly and had been writing about for a number of years. Rieff expresses profound pessimism about the ability of writing to affect world affairs, saying that at the start of the conflict, he and other journalists believed that if the truth of what was going on there was effectively conveyed to the outside world, it would be stopped—which wasn't the case. Other matter raised include the history of writers and artists who have served terrible causes, the relation of writing to reality, and the racial politics of reporting on Bosnia versus other conflicts like the civil wars underway in Somalia or Afghanistan.