June 08, 2008
JK Rowling as an Amnesty International alumna
One of the many things I like about the Harry Potter books is that they present a sophisticated view of politics. Hermione's decoding of Dolores Umbridge's speech in Order of the Phoenix could be an assigned reading in a course on bureaucracy. And the sheer unflinching hatred of tyranny and official cruelty that shines through the books makes it especially wonderful that so many children are growing up with them.
But I wouldn't have guessed that Rowling spent her twenties working in the London offices of Amnesty International. But so she says, in a Harvard Commencement address that might have been delivered by Albus Dumbledore. What she says about risk and imagination strikes me as exactly right.
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