A plea for honesty in discussions of sex and gender
A recent article of mine, called "Political Correctness Is Getting Out of Hand," elicited some angry emails. Not from people who...
top of page
Wright's Writing
Search
Dec 12, 20184 min read
Against "the postmodern novel"
[Here's an excerpt from a book on 'humanism' I wanted to write back in 2006. It's from a passage in which I was arguing against...
Jul 13, 20184 min read
Critical thoughts on "The Alchemist"
[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...
May 29, 20188 min read
The importance of John Brown
[Grad-school notes...] I'm reading about John Brown--David Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the...
Mar 23, 20181 min read
The Destruction of Reason
Just a quick note: I recently posted a long summary of and commentary on Georg Lukacs' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, which has...
Mar 11, 20189 min read
Collectivism
[Excerpts from this book.] Collectivism comes in both noble and evil forms. In the former, the principle of the individual is paramount;...
Nov 30, 20166 min read
On Susan Sontag
[Notes from 2008.] Reading Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. It’s wonderful to think that the publication (in...
Nov 10, 20162 min read
On "success"
[From this book.] The more one experiences the world, the more one understands how difficult it is to be “successful” and have integrity...
Jul 29, 20164 min read
Contemporary philosophy vs. sanity
[The following is a vignette I wrote years ago when studying for my Master's in philosophy. I was taking a class in contemporary...
Jul 9, 20165 min read
Elite pretentiousness
The following is the beginning of an essay I wanted to write years ago on the concept of pretentiousness, a phenomenon the ubiquity of...
Jun 22, 20166 min read
An underwhelming encounter with Christians
A misadventure. [Written in 2006.]— At lunch in the campus center I saw a flyer advertising an event tonight having something to do with...
Jun 21, 20164 min read
Notes on Theodor Adorno
[Old notes.] Reading Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Alex Thomson. I’m not very impressed with Adorno. Continental thinkers...
Jun 2, 20163 min read
"The West's" derivativeness
I’ve always suspected that people give too much credit to ancient Greeks. They couldn’t have been as divinely original as we’re taught....
May 31, 20161 min read
Random notes on Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, economics, and traditional China
Years ago I read and took some notes on various works by Hannah Arendt. In particular her classic Origins of Totalitarianism. It's a...
May 21, 20163 min read
Old notes on the Enlightenment
In Margaret Jacob's The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (2001), the selections from Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education...
May 6, 20163 min read
On the French Revolution
It’s interesting that the French Revolution’s liberalism in some ways helped make possible its illiberalism, its nationalism and...
May 5, 20162 min read
Catholicism, an anachronism
In the Piazza of San Marco in Florence is a church in which lies the dried-out corpse of Saint Antonino from the fifteenth century, his...
Jan 29, 201613 min read
Intellectual origins of American radicalism
Staughton Lynd's Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968) is a fantastic exploration of the ideological offshoots and effects...
Jan 5, 20163 min read
"The Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
[Notes from my journal.] I'm reading Paulo Freire’s famous little book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), which is apparently...
Sep 28, 20152 min read
Thoughts on thinkers
[Some notes I took a while ago. They may be kind of obvious, but I think it’s interesting to adopt something like Hegel’s perspective on...
bottom of page