Wright's Writing

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

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

[This article was published at CommonDreams.org.] We live in a time when it’s become a boring cliché to say that democracy is under...

Reading Charles Tilly’s classic Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992). Taking notes on it for myself, but also for...

A long time ago I posted some thoughts on America's use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. I happen to be reading parts of...

On various pages of this website and blog I've criticized some of the dogmas of feminism, for instance the social constructionist dogmas...

[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...

[This review was published at H-Socialisms.] The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated...

In an effort to escape the dreary drumbeat of daily news, I'm reading James McPherson's mammoth Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era...

[Old student notes on the early United States.] Quoting Edmund Morgan, in his famous 1972 article “Slavery and Freedom: The American...

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

In the time of Trumpism, Michael Paul Rogin’s great book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967) shouldn’t be as...

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

In case anyone is interested in the history of the Great Depression, particularly in Chicago, here's an excerpt from a chapter of my...

Here are some notes on an unjustly neglected book by the great Marxist David F. Noble (social historian of technology) called Progress...

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

Another excessively long blog post. I recently published a long article ("Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of...

If all goes well, I'll be publishing a book sometime in the not-too-distant future. It'll be called something like Popular Radicalism and...

…They accuse me -- Me -- the present writer of The present poem -- of -- I know not what -- A tendency to under-rate and scoff At human...