Searching Google News to see if author Robert Wright had written any articles lately, I came upon coverage of a Clinton breakfast speech near Toronto to a group of drugstore vendors (hey, the pay is decent). "two books he recommends to the audience are Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright".
Wright's most recent writing seems to be this series of articles at Slate. I'm reading and liking it already. Wright's plain style and unflinching scope show up immediately:
My argument will come in readily attackable form. It will be organized around a series of propositions—conveniently printed in boldface—that, I claim, describe the mess we're in. Interspersed with these descriptive propositions will be policy prescriptions in italics. To refute me, all you have to do is either show that the bold-faced sentences are wrong or show that the italicized sentences don't follow from them.Gosh, if we can only get our current president some better reading material... November 11, 2002 11:29 PMWarning: Some of the propositions will be a bit cosmic, dealing with large-scale social, technological, and historical trends. I believe we're standing at a genuine threshold in history, rivaled in significance by only a few past thresholds, and that any diagnosis of our plight that doesn't include some ambitious observations about, say, the future of information technology or the history of the nation-state isn't up to the challenge.