Wright's Writing

I just finished reading Steve Fraser's masterful The Age of Acquiescence (2014), which compares the popular responses to America's two...

This is going to be a whiny, self-pitying post. Just to warn you. The question is sometimes asked, "Why are stupid people frequently so...

[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.]...

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...

[Notes from 2006.] Reading The Alchemist, the novel that has sold tens of millions of copies. “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s...

[The following thoughts are from this book.] It’s funny that people often deprecate Marxian materialism as an explanation of society and...

[From this book.] The more one experiences the world, the more one understands how difficult it is to be “successful” and have integrity...

[The following is a vignette I wrote years ago when studying for my Master's in philosophy. I was taking a class in contemporary...

A misadventure. [Written in 2006.]— At lunch in the campus center I saw a flyer advertising an event tonight having something to do with...

[Old notes from my journal.] A lot of mainstream people would criticize me for immersing myself in leftist scholarship and journalism,...

Leftists are sometimes criticized for being condescending toward the masses, for arguing that they are prone to displaying "false...

What is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...

I'm finally reading [in 2011] E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so...

[This is another book-excerpt, a negatively charged one this time.] Nietzsche’s self-appointed task of “revaluating values” isn’t...

Albert Camus: “We [moderns] read more than we meditate. We have no philosophies but merely commentaries. This is what Étienne Gilson...

[The following is an excerpt from this book.] In order to determine someone’s intellectual or artistic integrity and acuity, a simple...

If intellectual curiosity means the desire to learn new things, encounter new ideas, explore and explain the world, then “intellectuals”...

The power of indoctrination is shown by the fact that most people don’t consider themselves radical leftists, socialists, or anarchists....