popular culture | Wright's Writing

Sep 25, 20222 min read

A free copy of my book

Last summer I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...

Aug 9, 202213 min read

The myth of the "moderate" American

[This article was published at Compact magazine.] In the United States there exists today, and has existed since at least the 1950s, a...

Jul 30, 20227 min read

Classical music vs. mediocrity

On one side is the mediocrity of all functionaries. All bureaucrats. There’s no point in my writing about bureaucrats in the ordinary...

Apr 19, 202114 min read

Review of "The Young Lords," by Johanna Fernández

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

Sep 4, 202035 min read

The Workers' Bill

Here's the last section of chapter 6 of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Depression. The previous two sections are...

Jul 25, 20188 min read

Grad-school notes on Populism and Progressivism

In The Populist Vision, Charles Postel argues persuasively that Populism, the greatest popular movement in American history, should not...

Feb 5, 20153 min read

Popular sanity

No reasonable person would deny that pop culture is a vulgar, artificial, debased and debasing thing. Does this mean that “the...