I’d live to give a couple of shout-outs to two friends of mine for works of creativity and courage.

First is my friend Greg Widen, a screenwriter who’s written films such as Highlander, The Prophecy and Backdraft—all smart and fun movies. I saw Highlander in a small town in France back in 1986, long before I knew Greg, and enjoyed it immensely.

Greg has just published his first novel, a thriller called Blood Makes Noise, which tells an improbable (but based on truth) story of mystery and murder and the corpse of Eva Peron. I’ve read it; it’s fantastic, a smart and literary historical page-turner. If there’s any justice in the book world, Blood Makes Noise should sell a million copies. Here’s hoping you buy one of them.

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The second person I’d like to give a shout-out to is John McKinney, the Republican minority leader in the Connecticut state assembly. John grew up down the street from me in Fairfield; we went to school together through eight grade, and then also at Yale. John’s father, Stuart McKinney, was our congressman, a Republican moderate like the kind you rarely see any more—economically conservative (and not like the Eric Cantors of the modern world) and socially fair-minded. He died in 1987 in a way that was very sad and deeply unexpected, but which his family handled with remarkable dignity and grace.

Maybe the humanity of that event in his life has served John, whose district includes Newtown, well. But in any case, John has been instrumental in putting together the package of gun control legislation justsigned into law by Connecticut governor Daniel Malloy.

Connecticut’s new gun control measures include background checks for all gun sales, a dangerous offenders registry and a ban on the sale or purchase of magazines holding more than ten rounds of bullets. Connecticut may now have the strongest gun laws in the country, and John had a lot to do with that.

Different kinds of risks and courage for these two friends, of course—creative and political. But in their own fields, they both took some big chances. In both cases, the outcome is terrific.