Robert Wright is the author of, most recently, the New York Times bestseller The Evolution of God and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a former writer and editor at The Atlantic. More
Wright is also a fellow at the New America Foundation and editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv. His other books include Nonzero, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book in 2000 and included on Fortune magazine's list of the top 75 business books of all-time. Wright's best-selling book The Moral Animal was selected as one of the ten best books of 1994 by The New York Times Book Review.Wright has contributed to The Atlantic for more than 20 years. He has also contributed to a number of the country's other leading magazines and newspapers, including: The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Time, and Slate, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
... it would be Barack Obama. At least, that's the way I interpret Bill Scher's argument in the clip below. And if I'm reading Matt Lewis correctly, Obama is--in a kind of hypothetical/metaphorical sense--feeling Oedipal hostilities toward Huckabee. But my interpretation could be wrong. You be the judge... More »
Suddenly lots of people are asking whether calling someone an "Israel-firster" is anti-Semitic. The occasion for these reflections is a controversy--the subject of a Washington Post piece yesterday--surrounding the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. The Post piece noted a "dispute with several Jewish organizations over charges that some center staffers have publicly used language that could be construed as anti-Israel or… More »
A few days of bombing won't lastingly set back Iran's nuclear program More »
Skits that make fun of Tim Tebow are often funny, but they probably hurt the cause of the secular liberals who typically create it. More »
It didn't take him long to realize that his premature retirement was premature. More »
What Israel can do for a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East More »
Reports of an Israeli 'false flag' operation may explain why Iran blames America for the killing of its scientists More »
In his New Hampshire concession speech, Ron Paul sounded like a man who knew he wasn't going to get the Republican presidential nomination. But he also sounded like a man who didn't plan to throw in the towel anytime soon. So what does he expect to accomplish by persisting? In this week's The Week in Blog, Bill Scher and Matt Lewis ponder the question: Feel free to air your own theories below. More »
If you had asked me a few days ago, before news broke that American soldiers have urinated on Taliban corpses, whether American soldiers have ever urinated on Taliban corpses, I would have said: Probably. You send hordes of young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, and the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will… More »
Is the slippery slope to war a bug or a feature? More »
Yesterday afternoon The Washington Post reported evidence that the Obama administration's policy toward Iran has become one of "regime collapse." The Post quoted an unidentified "senior U.S. intelligence official" as saying that the goal is to "create enough hate and discontent at the street level" so that the people will turn against their government. Here's the headline: Then yesterday evening the Post took that story down and… More »
How much overlap is there between liberal goals and libertarian goals? More »
Trying to make sense of Santorum's eccentric views on Palestinians More »
Is it really true that defense department R&D plays a crucial role in the American economy? More »
Is the conservative inability to coalesce around a Romney alternative a technological problem? More »
We may be closer to war with Iran than most Americans realize. More »
By introducing moral imagination to the foreign-policy conversation, the Republican candidate is doing the nation an important service. More »
The award should have gone to the thing that empowered last year's wave of protest: the Internet. More »
For all the advances and wonders of our global era, Christians, Jews, and Muslims seem ever more locked in mortal combat. But history suggests a happier outcome for the Peoples of the Book. As technological evolution has brought communities, nations, and faiths into closer contact, it is the prophets of tolerance and love that have prospered, along with the religions they represent. Is globalization, in fact, God’s will?
