Wright's Writing

[Published at Dissident Voice and other places.] Twitter conversations with public intellectuals are rarely worthy of note, but a recent...

Here's an insanely long post. It's actually a "literary experiment" I wrote almost twenty years ago (as the following preface says, which...

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

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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

I was recently skimming old notes of mine and came across the following thoughts from a two-volume book on "humanism" I wanted to write...

In case anyone out there has an interest in Plato, here's a paper from my student days in which I did the shamelessly anachronistic and...

Here's a paper from my undergraduate days, which you might find mildly interesting in its outline (and critique) of both Kantian and...

Back in my twenties I had an intellectual and creative energy I don't have anymore. I was consumed by philosophy, jumping from topic to...

[From 2009.] I’m reading Thomas Nagel’s famous book The View From Nowhere (1986). Nagel seems more sensible than most contemporary...

[Excerpts from this book. See also this blog post, "Excerpts on happiness."] The meaning of life?— Life is not totally “meaningless.”...

[Grad-school notes...] I'm reading about John Brown--David Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the...

[From Notes of an Underground Humanist.] How is mass inhumanity possible?— When I ask myself how it’s possible that so many white...

[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 long comment I wrote on a Facebook thread months ago arguing against a left-wing friend that--in swing states--one...

I attended my first Episcopalian service last night [in April 2010]. It was Maundy Thursday, so we did the whole foot-washing thing and...