Wright's Writing

You may have noticed that the question of immigration is on people’s minds lately (as it has been, almost without interruption, since the...

[Old notes.] I’m reading Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (2014). Good book,...

[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...

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

Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to post my notes...

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

These are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...

When I was younger, I used to wonder: should I care what people think of me? I saw arguments on both sides of the question. And I still...

Here's a very dry paper I wrote for a class in 2012. I thought I should know more about urban public policy, so I decided to research the...

W. E. B. DuBois’s great work Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, published in 1935, isn’t a very easy read. But it’s important as...

[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...

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

Karl Kautsky’s book Foundations of Christianity: A Study in Christian Origins (1908) is quite good. Despite his flaws and mistakes (both...

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

David Noble's essay "Digital Diploma Mills," written in the 1990s, is a brilliant and still timely critique of the automation and...

David Graeber died. At 59. Tomorrow, you or I might die. At any moment. Meanwhile, we pretend life has meaning. Eventually, we will die....

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

The last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...

Some bloggers like to post accounts of their world travels. So—why not?—I'll do the same. Here are some journal entries from almost...

[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...