Wright's Writing

In an effort to escape the dreary drumbeat of daily news, I'm reading James McPherson's mammoth Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era...

[Old student notes on the early United States.] Quoting Edmund Morgan, in his famous 1972 article “Slavery and Freedom: The American...

The good folks at DSA (of which I'm a proud member) were kind enough to publish the following article recently in their online...

In the time of Trumpism, Michael Paul Rogin’s great book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967) shouldn’t be as...

Some months ago I saw Richard Dawkins recommend on Twitter a new book called The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and...

In case anyone is interested in the history of the Great Depression, particularly in Chicago, here's an excerpt from a chapter of my...

Here are some notes on an unjustly neglected book by the great Marxist David F. Noble (social historian of technology) called Progress...

You may have heard of the “talking gorilla” Koko. I remember as a child reading about this fascinating creature that had been trained to...

Another excessively long blog post. I recently published a long article ("Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of...

If all goes well, I'll be publishing a book sometime in the not-too-distant future. It'll be called something like Popular Radicalism and...

…They accuse me -- Me -- the present writer of The present poem -- of -- I know not what -- A tendency to under-rate and scoff At human...

You may have noticed that the question of immigration is on people’s minds lately (as it has been, almost without interruption, since the...

[Old notes.] I’m reading Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (2014). Good book,...

[Here are notes I took many years ago while reading Richard Rorty’s famous book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. As you’ll see from...

[This academic review was posted at H-Net.] Johanna Fernández’s The Young Lords: A Radical History could hardly have been published at a...

Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them in my own words, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to...

Anarchism (anti-authoritarianism, love of freedom) is an essential thing, an essential guide for our thinking and action, but I have to...

These are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...

When I was younger, I used to wonder: should I care what people think of me? I saw arguments on both sides of the question. And I still...

Here's a very dry paper I wrote for a class in 2012. I thought I should know more about urban public policy, so I decided to research the...