Robert Wright (journalist)

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Robert Wright is an American journalist and prize-winning author of best-selling books about science, evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory, including Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. He is a visiting scholar at The University of Pennsylvania.

Wright has served as a Senior Editor at The Sciences and later at The New Republic, and as an editor at The Wilson Quarterly. He has been a contributing editor at The New Republic (where he also co-authored the "TRB" column), Time and Slate, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He contributes frequently to The New York Times.

On November 1, 2005, Wright and blogger Mickey Kaus launched Bloggingheads.tv, a current-events dia-vlog. Bloggingheads dia-vlogs are conducted via webcam, and can be viewed online or downloaded as MP3 sound files. New diavlogs are posted approximately twice a week and are archived. While many diavlogs feature Wright and Kaus, other regular participants at Bloggingheads.tv include Eric Alterman, Ann Althouse, Jonathan Chait, David Corn, Ross Douthat, Jonah Goldberg, Ezra Klein, James Pinkerton, Mark Schmitt, Matthew Yglesias, weapons expert Jacqueline Shire, the political scientists Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell, and others. They collectively represent diverse political viewpoints, and Wright and Kaus differ politically as well.

Wright has also used bloggingheads.tv to conduct interviews with, among others, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama about his book America at the Crossroads; the Israeli journalist Gershom Golenberg on his book The Accidental Empire (about the history of the settlements); the weapons expert Jeffrey Lewis; the Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach on an article of his about global-warming skeptics; and Andrew Sullivan on his book The Conservative Soul. All are archived at the bloggingheads site.

Wright has also ventured into video-on-Internet with his MeaningofLife.tv website, in which he interviews a number of scholars, scientists, and thinkers about their ideas and opinions regarding religion and spirituality.

Wright is currently under contract to write a book on religion and international politics. Publication is expected in the spring of 2008.

[edit] Awards

The New York Times Book Review chose Wright's The Moral Animal as one of the 12 best books of 1994; it was a national bestseller and has been published in 12 languages. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny was a The New York Times Book Review Notable Book in the year 2000 and has been published in nine languages. Fortune Magazine included Nonzero on a list of "the 75 smartest [business-related] books of all time." Wright's first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, was published in 1988 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Wright's column "The Information Age," written for The Sciences magazine, won the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism.

[edit] Bibliography

• Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. HarperCollins, 1989. ISBN 0-06-097257-2
• The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Vintage, 1995. ISBN 0-679-76399-6
• Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Vintage, 2001. ISBN 0-679-75894-1

[edit] External links

• Nonzero.org - A website for Wright's book Nonzero
• MeaningOfLife.tv - Wright's website recording his interviews of noted scientists including Daniel Dennett, John Maynard Smith, Steven Pinker, John Polkinghorne, and Francis Fukuyama
• Slate Magazine - Wright was a Slate contributor and many of his articles are available here via a search for his name
• The Globalization of Morality - An interview with Wright from What Is Enlightenment? Magazine
• Ambling Toward a Win-Win World? - A review of Nonzero from Radical Middle Newsletter
• BloggingHeads.tv - Diavlog (video blog) of Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus
• TEDTalks - Wright's speech for the TED Conference 2006