Robert Wright: All Publications, Events and Press

NYTimes.com Highlights Bloggingheads Video Featuring Mark Schmitt

Communications — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:47:00 -0500

New America in the News:

Mark Schmitt, of the New America Foundation, and Megan McArdle, of The Atlantic, discuss whether vouchers are the answer to public education's problems. Please click here for a link to the video on NYTimes.com. For Schmitt andMcArdle's complete conversation, please follow this link to Bloggingheads.tv, where they also cover inequality, taxation, and gentrification.

Bloggingheads.tv, the video site where policy analysts, bloggers, and other pundits argue about politics and policy, was co-founded by New America Senior Fellow Robert Wright. The New York Times recently partnered with Bloggingheads.tv to excerpt “diavlogs” on NYTimes.com.

Planet of the Apes

Articles — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:27:00 -0400

This week the mystery deepened: Why no space aliens?

On Tuesday, scientists reported finding the most “Earthlike” planet ever, Gliese 581c. Its sun is cooler than ours, but also closer, so Gliese is in that climatic comfort zone conducive to water -- hence to life, hence to evolution, hence to intelligent beings with advanced technology. Yet they never phone.

It’s actually a serious question, long pondered by sci-fi types. Since a civilization whose technological evolution was ahead of ours by even a few centuries could contact us from far, far away (and certainly from Gliese, a mere 20 light-years away), what… more

The Neocon Paradox

Articles — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:34:00 -0400

Neoconservatives have been airing an explanation for the failure of the Iraq war that’s so obvious you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself: the war wasn’t neoconservative enough.

Last week Richard Perle, on The Charlie Rose Show, echoed what his fellow neocon John Bolton told the BBC last month: We should have turned Iraq over to the Iraqis much sooner. Then, presumably, the power of democracy to blossom pronto in even nutrient-depleted soil -- the neocon elan vital -- would have kicked in.

Nice try, but they’re just digging themselves in deeper. They’re highlighting a paradox within the neocon game… more

Why Darwinism Isn't Depressing

Articles — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:41:00 -0400

Scientists have discovered that love is truth.

Granted, no scientist has put it quite like that. In fact, when scientists talk about love -- the neurochemistry, the evolutionary origins -- they make it sound unlovely.

More broadly, our growing grasp of the biology behind our thoughts and feelings has some people downhearted. One commentator recently acknowledged the ascendancy of the Darwinian paradigm with a sigh: "Evolution doesn't really lead to anything outside itself."

Cheer up! Despair is a plausible response to news that our loftiest feelings boil down to genetic self-interest, but genetic self-interest actually turns out to be our salvation. The selfishness… more

E-Mail and Prozac

adminn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:23:00 -0400

I have a theory: the more e-mail there is, the more Prozac there will be, and the more Prozac there is, the more e-mail there will be. Maybe I should explain.

Twenty millenniums ago, communication was simple. Utterances were usefully accompanied by nonverbal cues: tone of voice, facial expression, nudging your fellow hunter-gatherer in the ribs upon reaching a punch line.

Twenty years ago, communication was still pretty simple. Much of it was by phone -- no nudging, true, but intonation could help distinguish, say, wry irony from bitter resentment. Plus, when you asked a question, the answer came in… more

Shock Talk Without Apologies

Articles — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 17:57:00 -0400

There has to be an Imus event every once in a while. Ethnicity being the volatile thing it is, gratuitously inflammatory remarks have to be discouraged, so bounds of acceptable speech have to be clarified. Clarity comes when, inevitably, someone oversteps and gets slapped down.

Maybe this particular boundary could have been clarified with less punishment, given how abjectly Don Imus has apologized. Still, there had to be a price, and, compared with the prices paid in some multiethnic societies (remember Yugoslavia?), this is a bargain.

But is America’s machinery for stigmatizing bigotry really working coherently?

If social harmony is the… more

Making The U.N. Look Good

Articles — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 03:11:00 -0400

The United Nations. Among mainstream American political thinkers, those three words elicit reactions that run the gamut from deep antipathy to less deep antipathy. O.K., I’m overstating the case. Many liberals will go all the way to deep ambivalence, and some venture further.

Still, even defenders of the institution can’t seem to start a defense of it without half-apologizing and ritually reciting its structural flaws.

Today I’ll break new ground by saving the recitation of flaws for last. First, let’s celebrate an underacknowledged feat. During a crucial phase of history -- the run-up to the Iraq war -- the United… more

An Easter Sermon

Articles — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:23:00 -0400

Jesus knew viral marketing.

In the Gospel of Mark, the disciple John complains that nondisciples are selling bootlegged copies of Jesus’ miraculous powers. ‘‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”

Jesus tells John to quit obsessing about the intellectual property and to focus on getting the brand out. ‘‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.” Jesus adds, ‘‘Whoever is not against us is for us.”

Fast-forward two… more

My Life in the Army

Articles — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:34:00 -0400

In one sense, I was well positioned to enjoy the summer of love. In 1969, I was living in San Francisco, epicenter of hippiedom, antiwar fervor and utopian hope for perpetual peace.

Circumstances kept me from sharing the spirit. The part of San Francisco I lived in was the Presidio, which was then a military base. I was 12, and my father was an Army officer. I remember my family once driving toward the Presidio’s Lombard Street gate past tens of thousands of protesters who seemed to think my father was part of a very bad outfit.

I was sure they… more

How We Make Life-and-Death Decisions

Articles — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:52:00 -0500

"Morality is more properly felt than judged of; though this feeling or sentiment is commonly so soft and gentle, that we are apt to confound it with an idea."-- David Hume, Scottish philosopher

****

When it came to moral "reasoning," David Hume emphasized the quotation marks. We like to think our views on right and wrong are rational, he said, but ultimately they are grounded in emotion.

Philosophers have argued over this claim for a quarter of a millennium without resolution. Time’s up! Now scientists armed with brain scanners are stepping in to settle the matter. So far it looks… more

New York Sun Profiles Robert Wright's BloggingHeads.tv

Communications — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 04:43:00 -0500

New America in the News:

With a droll, self-deprecating demeanor, Robert Wright engages a smiling Mickey Kaus each week in a conversation broadcast on their Web site, Bloggingheads.tv. Their running quarrel has attracted a growing number of Web users who want to see rather than merely read bloggers — and who appreciate the efforts to wrestle with the issues of the day.

Mr. Wright, a lean, neatly dressed fellow with a slightly dyspeptic online persona, is more liberal than Mr. Kaus. The founder of the blog Kausfiles is a more lying-in-the-reeds, crocodilian type who describes himself a conservative Democrat. Even this is open to debate, Mr. Wright says: "There's widespread suspicion that his claim to be a conservative Democrat is less than completely forthcoming..."

Popular bloggers, Mr. Wright said, tend to have followings of people who are curious about what they look like. Enter Bloggingheads.tv. The company logo features a stick-figure illustration with a head inside a television monitor walking on two feet.

There are no commercial breaks, allowing the bloggers an in-depth and open-ended coverage of the issues. The subject matter — a mix of politics and some culture — makes the Webcast appear as though employees of the New Republic or the American Prospect had taken over a local news station and set up shop to discuss their differences with the National Review and the American Spectator.

Their Web site grew out of long phone conversations between Messrs. Wright and Kaus. "I found them very productive," Mr. Kaus said. "I always thought the talks were actually more useful than anything I write." They started the site with hopes that nuanced, open-ended discussion could reach a level of analysis beyond that of daily newspapers.

From his home in California, Mr. Kaus appears on a split screen alongside Mr. Wright, who is in New Jersey. They are sometimes informally attired, and in the background one can see such things as bookcases, filing cabinets, and air-conditioners. Mr. Wright's remarks are sometimes punctuated by gulps from a plastic cup or a roll of his eyes at Mr. Kaus's latest point.

At times, the video feed makes it feel like one is watching slow-motion NASA footage. Mr. Wright recalled the time a barking dog was heard in the background. But visitors to the site may be witnessing the beginnings of a new information and entertainment form, a kind of a garage band, so to speak, which could eventually fill a stadium. The Web site already draws about 150,000 visitors a month...

For the complete article, please visit The New York Sun website.

A Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Love

Articles — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 02:29:00 -0400

As liberals try to articulate a post-Bush foreign policy, some are feeling a bit of cognitive dissonance.

They have always thought of themselves as idealistic, concerned with the welfare of humankind. Not for them the ruthlessly narrow focus on national self-interest of the "realist" foreign policy school. That school’s most famous practitioner, Henry Kissinger, is for many liberals a reminder of how easily the ostensible amorality of classic realism slides into immorality.

Yet idealism has lost some of its luster. Neoconservatism, whose ascendancy has scared liberals into a new round of soul-searching, seems plenty idealistic, bent on spreading democracy and… more

BusinessWeek Profiles Robert Wright's BloggingHeads.tv

Communications — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 17:54:00 -0400

New America in the News:

If I may borrow someone else's adaptation, soon everyone will be famous for 15 people on the Web. That can even be where wider-world fame starts, because the Net is both farm team and idea incubator from which traditional players steal new notions and talent...

Middle-aged pundits Mickey Kaus, author of the long-running blog kausfiles, and Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the centrist think tank New America Foundation, will never get massive on MySpace. But Wright's site bloggingheads.tv, on which he and Kaus tangle remotely via webcams on matters political, may portend a next generation of political talk shows. "In theory," Wright says, "narrower niche audiences should work now." Not that he has tested a business model yet. Bloggingheads launched last November and is ad-free, though Wright says if the audience keeps growing, a partner or investor and then -- gasp -- ads could follow.

The site is so strenuously devoted to eggheadedness that the aside "you are turning into Senator Moynihan" works as a joking inside reference to the late, famously erudite and self-referential New York pol. (Perhaps you had to be there.) Bloggingheads airs two or three hour-long face-offs each week, with Wright and Kaus appearing in tandem on one of them. But if the site has stars, it's them. "Star," in this context, doesn't mean Katie Couric. Here, the talent wear ungainly dangling earpieces, guzzle take-out coffee, and gnaw bagels on air. At times it's not entirely clear on these "diavlogs" whether Kaus has changed out of the sweatshirt he slept in the night before. "We wanted to distinguish this from what you see on TV," says the reliably deadpan Wright. "One way of driving the point home immediately is the fact we look like [expletive]."

Despite, or because of, these reasons, bloggingheads is great. It's smarter than the networks' Sunday morning talking-points recitations and more engaging than PBS' high-minded fare. What could be the future of political talk is so creaky and homemade it resembles public-access TV.

"The point is," says Kaus, "if I were having a phone conversation with Bob, this is what it would be like..."

For the complete article, please visit BusinessWeek online.

They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us

Articles — Sun, 14 May 2006 16:20:01 -0400

You wouldn't expect to find good news for President Bush in a book by Andrew Kohut, a pollster and commentator who seems to divide his time between quantifying America's Bush-era plunge in the world's esteem and quantifying Bush's plunge in America's esteem. Then again, you also wouldn't expect to find good news for President Bush in a book by Julia E. Sweig, a liberal senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. But Sweig's Friendly Fire joins Kohut's America Against the World (written with the columnist Bruce Stokes) in showing that Bush isn't the only one to blame for the… more

The Silent Treatment

Articles — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The American left and right don't agree on much, but weeks of demonstrations and embassy burnings have pushed them toward convergence on one point: there is, if not a clash of civilizations, at least a very big gap between the "Western world" and the "Muslim world." When you get beyond this consensus -- the cultural chasm consensus -- and ask what to do about the problem, there is less agreement. After all, chasms are hard to bridge.

Fortunately, this chasm's size is being exaggerated. The Muslim uproar over those Danish cartoons isn't as alien to American culture as we… more

Will Globalization Make Hatred More Lethal?

Articles — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

"Link found between hatred and killing" is not a headline that would sell many newspapers. But you might turn a few heads with "Link between hatred and killing changes in ominous way." Or--to put a finer point on it--"Ratio of killing to hatred slated to rise." This is one of the biggest stories of the last 30 years and, probably, the next 30 years: the growing lethality of hatred.

Why has terrorism become public enemy number one? The most common answer--the rise of a brand of radical Islam that uses terror as its weapon -- -is true insofar… more

Terror in the Past And Future Tense

Articles — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City seems as if it happened less than 10 years ago, but its 10th anniversary, which happened a week ago, seems as if it didn't happen at all. And for practical purposes it didn't. Lots of stories made a bigger ripple in the week's zeitgeist -- some of them understandably (new pope chosen), some less so (on ''American Idol,'' Anwar's journey ends).

This attention deficit is partly explained by what took place in Lower Manhattan six years after the bombing. Osama bin Laden's atrocity dwarfed Timothy McVeigh's along… more

The Market Shall Set You Free

Articles — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Last week President Bush again laid out a faith-based view of the world and again took heat for it. Human history, the president said in his inaugural address, "has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty." Accordingly, America will pursue "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world" -- and Mr. Bush has "complete confidence" of success. Critics on the left and right warned against grounding foreign policy in such nanve optimism (a world without tyrants?) and such unbounded faith.

But the problem with the speech is actually the opposite. Mr. Bush has… more

Faith, Hope and Clarity

Articles — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The Bush administration is suddenly taking pains to calibrate the president's devoutness: yes, Mr. Bush is very religious, but he's not too religious -- not hearing-voices religious.

Last week several White House aides insisted that, contrary to the witness of the televangelist Pat Robertson, the president never said God had guaranteed him a low casualty count in Iraq. And as for those reports about Mr. Bush feeling summoned to the presidency: Laura Bush denies that her husband sees himself as a divine instrument. ''It's not a faith where he hears from God,'' she said a few days ago.

It's hard to settle… more

War on Evil

Articles — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 03:00:00 -0400

Evil has a reputation for resilience. And rightly so. Banishing it from Middle Earth alone took three very long Lord of the Rings movies. But equally deserving of this reputation is the concept of evil -- in particular, a conception of evil that was on display in those very movies: the idea that behind all the world's bad deeds lies a single, dark, cosmic force. No matter how many theologians reject this idea, no matter how incompatible it seems with modern science, it keeps coming back.

You would have thought St. Augustine rid the world of it a millennium… more