My goal is to put serious ideas in popular forms. And to make them dramatic, moving, and funny. To make them entertainments.

When I was a kid there was a long shelf over the head of my bed and on that shelf was the collected works of George Bernard Shaw. What made Shaw stand out, aside from his wit and the huge success he had in his day, was that he created dramas out of ideas. Not just ideas in the abstract, ideas as human motivation, as the basis for choices, for action, and as the cause for conflict.

I believe that's true. There are a whole lot more corpses killed over theology than by gangstas in the hood battling over the drug trade. There's a whole lot more killing based on ideology than there is over sexual passions run amuck. A whole lot more stealing comes from economic theories than from all the stick-ups and burglaries in the world. The kind of con men who appear in The Grifters and The Sting are nothing compared to Countrywide, AIG, and Goldman-Sachs.

Most of the time we take our intellectual superstructure for granted. In much the same way that we treat the physical infrastructure of our lives. We assume that having roads, traffic signals, water from the tap, electricity out of the socket, heat in our homes, schools for our children, cops on patrol, is the natural order of things. What goes into creating that infrastructure and how it effects the choices we make is effectively invisible to us.

The trick, in fiction, is to create situations in which ideas - about God, why we go to war, who gets the money, how politics work, what the media actually does, about science and morality - are challenged by circumstances. And in which people with different ideas about such things are pitted against each other.

Job #1 is to make it entertaining. But what makes it worth doing, is to make that entertainment something worth thinking about.