Wright's Writing

Life in the 21st century as we all wait consciously or unconsciously for the apocalypse is boring and driven by distractions, an endless...

[Student notes from ten years ago.] Reading Robert A. Brady’s classic Business as a System of Power (1943), which influenced Chomsky....

Today I came across a copy of Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and was reminded of myself in my twenties, when I was...

[An old student paper.] The conventional understanding of labor unions and their membership in the 1960s is of a conservative and...

Sometimes I like to return to philosophy in order to get the sort of intellectual stimulation that reading history doesn't provide. E.g.,...

As I frequently and tiresomely reiterate, academic writing tends toward sophistry, superficiality, and obscurantism. Personally, my...

While writing my PhD dissertation a few years ago ("Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression"), I...

[From 2009.] I’m reading Thomas Nagel’s famous book The View From Nowhere (1986). Nagel seems more sensible than most contemporary...

[This was supposed to be a short outline for a student presentation I had to give. So excuse the roughness. Here are more book reviews.]...

[Maybe it's self-indulgent of me to keep posting old notes from my student years, but just in case anyone out there gives a shit, I guess...

[Here are some notes from the first syllabus I wrote for the U.S. History After 1865 survey course. Below them are overly ambitious notes...

[These notes, for what they're worth, are from, respectively, 2010 and 2018.] Reading Raymond Williams’ classic Marxism and Literature...

I've been reading Camille Paglia's collection of essays Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992). I disagree with a lot of Paglia's...

[Also here]. I’ve been reading Gabriel and Joyce Kolko’s classic The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–54...

As a leftist, "I wish we could all just get along." Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe it would get boring pretty quickly. But a little less...

This is from a letter Sigmund Freud wrote to his pastor friend Oskar Pfister: I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I...

[Years ago I took notes on the book mentioned below, which I thought I'd post here for the heck of it. Maybe someone will find them...

A recent article of mine, called "Political Correctness Is Getting Out of Hand," elicited some angry emails. Not from people who...

Been reading The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. It's a good...

Lugubrious. That's the word for how I'm feeling tonight. That and self-indulgent. So I thought I'd write a blog post. These midnight...