Robert Wright (born 1957) is an American journalist, scholar, and prize-winning author of best-selling books about science, evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory, including The Evolution of God, 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 and Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.
Wright was born in Lawton, Oklahoma to a Southern Baptist family and raised in (among other places) San Francisco. A self-described "Army brat", Wright attended Texas Christian University for a year before transferring to Princeton University, later graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in public and international affairs. His professors at college included author John McPhee, whose style influenced Wright's first book.
Wright 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, including a stint as guest columnist for the month of April, 2007 and as a contributor to The Opinionator, a web-only opinion page in 2010.
On November 1, 2005, Wright and blogger Mickey Kaus launched Bloggingheads.tv, a current-events diavlog. Bloggingheads diavlogs are conducted via webcam, and can be viewed online or downloaded either as WMV or MP4 video files or as MP3 sound files. New diavlogs are posted approximately 5-10 times a week and are archived. While many diavlogs feature Wright and Kaus, other regular participants at Bloggingheads.tv include Rosa Brooks, Conn Carroll, Jonathan Chait, Joshua Cohen, David Corn, Ross Douthat, Daniel Drezner, Garance Franke-Ruta, John Horgan, Heather Hurlburt, George Johnson, Mark Kleiman, Ezra Klein, Jeffrey Lewis, Glenn Loury, Megan McArdle, John McWhorter, James Pinkerton, Jacqueline Shire, Mark Schmitt, Will Wilkinson and Matthew Yglesias. They 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 Gorenberg 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.
Wright has also ventured into video-on-Internet with his MeaningofLife.tv website, in which he interviews a number of scholars, theologians, scientists and cosmic thinkers about their ideas and opinions regarding religion and spirituality.
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. 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.
Wright lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife Lisa and their two daughters.They have a family pet, a poodle mix named Frazier, who is featured in a few bloggingheads.tv episodes.
He described himself as agnostic on The Colbert Report.
