Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaigner Émile Arnaud (1864–1921) and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901. The concept is an ancient one that goes back to the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) and Jesus. In modern times, it was refined by Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) into the practice of steadfast nonviolent opposition which he called "satyagraha". Its effectiveness served as inspiration to Martin Luther King Jr. among many others. An iconic image of pacifism came out of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 with the "Tank Man", where one protester stood in nonviolent opposition to a column of tanks. Historians have identified that event as being a key motivation that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall which ultimately precipitated the nonviolent fall of Communism. The Arab Spring movement is a current example where pacifist methods have been used.

Sebastian Junger (born January 17, 1962) is an American author, journalist and documentarian, most famous for the best-selling book The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea, his award-winning chronicle of the war in Afghanistan in the 2010 movie Restrepo, and his 2010 book War.

Junger was born in Belmont, Massachusetts, the son of Ellen Sinclair, a painter, and Miguel Chapero Junger, a physicist. His father was born in Dresden, Germany, of Russian, Austrian, Spanish, and Italian descent; he came to the United States during World War II because his own father had been Jewish. Junger grew up in the neighborhood of the Boston Strangler, which later inspired his 2006 book A Death in Belmont about the event. He graduated from Concord Academy in 1980 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University in cultural anthropology in 1984.

In 1997, with the publication of his work, The Perfect Storm, he was touted as a new Hemingway, and helped usher a renewed interest in adventure non-fiction. He received a National Magazine Award in 2000 for "The Forensics of War," published in Vanity Fair, where he still works as a contributing editor. In early 2007 he reported from Nigeria on the subject of blood oil. With photographer Tim Hetherington, Junger received the DuPont-Columbia Award for broadcast journalism for his work on The Other War: Afghanistan, produced with ABC News and Vanity Fair, which appeared on Nightline in September 2008.

Clarence Seward Darrow (April 18, 1857 – March 13, 1938) was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks (1924) and defending John T. Scopes in the Scopes "Monkey" Trial (1925), in which he opposed William Jennings Bryan (statesman, noted orator, and 3-time presidential candidate). Called a "sophisticated country lawyer", he remains notable for his wit and agnosticism, which marked him as one of the most famous American lawyers and civil libertarians.

Clarence Darrow was born in rural northeastern Ohio on April 18, 1857. He was the son of Amirus Darrow and Emily (Eddy) Darrow. Both the Darrow and the Eddy farms had deep roots in colonial New England, and several of Darrow's ancestors served in the American Revolution. Clarence's father was an ardent abolitionist and a proud iconoclast and religious freethinker, known in town as the "village infidel." Emily Darrow was an early supporter of female suffrage and a women's rights advocate. Clarence attended Allegheny College and the University of Michigan Law School but did not graduate from either institution. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. The Clarence Darrow Octagon House, which was his childhood home in the small town of Kinsman, Ohio, contains a memorial to him.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, he often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness, and has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth and sex. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization.

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in New York City, and spent much of his youth in the Rochester, New York, area. He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received a B.A. in philosophy from Haverford College. He lives today with his wife and two children in South Berwick, Maine. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Baker has been a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media. He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library for sending thousands of books to a landfill, the elimination of card catalogs, and the destruction of old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm. In 1997, Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts.