Wright's Writing

[This is a review published at H-Socialisms.] Vivek Chibber. The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn. Harvard University...

One of the first laws of human existence, or at least of existence in class societies (determined by anti-human institutions that mold...

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

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

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

[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...

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

[An article from several months ago.] In the age of COVID-19, it’s even more obvious than it’s been for at least a couple of decades that...

[From 2015.] Reading a bunch of articles on cognitive development. A fascinating field. Interesting: Human infants who receive little...

[Notes from ten years ago.] I’m amazed at the extent of our culture’s cult of secrecy in matters of the body. Even in this age, people...

If you're like me and are dumb enough to take an interest in abstruse debates among social scientists, you may have heard of the "debate"...

Years later, I still reproach myself for self-publishing my book on cooperatives, because that ensured it would have a limited...

Philosophers have a tendency to treat questions that revolve around the meaning of a particular concept as if they are more substantive...

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

[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...

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

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...

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

Questions Raised by 9/11, and Their Answers [An old grad-school paper] Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to...