The Wright Show

Should Democrats be freaking out about their presidential field? ... The base activation strategy vs. the swing voter strategy ... Who are the top tier candidates, and who could still enter the top tier? ... How would a Trump-leaning swing voter view the Biden-Harris dustup? ... Why Warren may have the winning message ... Has Warren put the "Native American thing" to bed? ... Who would do best against Trump on the debate stage? ... Trump's "go back" tweet as a new low ... By attacking Biden now, is Trump being crazy or crazy like a fox? ...

Common misconceptions about meditation retreats ... Hitting the bliss button ... Scheduled vs. unscheduled retreats ... How austere does it have to be to be effective? ... Process vs. outcomes ... Bob's mini-epiphany about his dripping sink ... Is meditation "for" something? ... Pitfalls after leaving a retreat ... Tips for first-timers ...

Serene’s new book, Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World ... Serene’s theological upbringing and early encounters with Calvin’s writings ... What a romantic tragedy early in life taught Serene about God’s grace ... A revelatory brush with death in rural India ... Timothy McVeigh and the challenge of forgiveness ... How Serene’s father met an epic challenge to his faith and his charity ...

Lee’s new book The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience  ... Why scientific theories are never “proved” ... Karl Popper’s principle of falsification explained  ... Why the philosophy of science hasn’t been useful to scientists ... Why philosophers of science need a new way to talk about evidence ... Can philosophy of science help refute science deniers?  ... Flat Earthers, science denial, and the scientific attitude  ... Cognitive bias, ideology, and the social sciences  ... Lee: There is no consensus about the epistemological status of science ... The hubris of “naive realism”  ...

What would a war with Iran look like? ... Ilan: The recent attacks on tankers were "almost definitely" Iranian ... How tit-for-tat attacks could spiral into war ... Bob: Trump is abusing America's central role in the global financial system ... What happens after the 2020 election? ... Signs that hardliners are winning the argument within Iran ... Debating whether Iran is a uniquely bad actor in the Middle East ...

A brief primer on the free will vs. determinism debate ... Are moral responsibility and determinism compatible? ... Is punishment a tragic necessity or a moral good? ... Gideon tries to convince Bob that compatibilism is coherent ... Gideon's distinctive take on compatibilism ... A thought experiment about the moral culpability of an ancient slaveholder ... Free will and the mind-body problem ... Buddhist ideas about punishment ...

Chris’s new book, Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy ... Are libertarians, generally speaking, anti-war? ... Chris: The U.S. is powerful because people want to emulate us ... Libertarianism and international law ... Why has Congress let presidents usurp its war powers? ... The sorrows and joys of international weapons inspection treaties ... Why libertarian foreign policy is conducive to American security ... Does America have an imperialist foreign policy? ...

The Trump administration’s "Iran Disinformation Project," which Negar helped expose ... Following the State Department money ... Will Congress cancel funding for the project? ... Heshmat Alavi, the Iran expert who turns out not to exist ... How is Trump viewed in Iran? ... Negar: Sanctions, though painful, won’t bring the Iranian regime down ... Could Trump cut a new nuclear deal? ...

Oliver's recent essay in the Guardian, "How the news took over reality" ... The vanished distinction between private and public spheres ... Oliver: Maybe our problem is too much participation in democracy ... Bob on the halcyon early days at Slate, when writers didn't know their traffic stats ... Oliver: We've put the fear in our pockets ... Is it possible to be enlightened on Twitter? ... Tending our community gardens ...

Gabe, just returned from a stint in China, on the controversial tech giant Huawei ... Is the battle over Huawei in fact just about curbing China's power? ... The "did we get China wrong?" debate ... Gabe (kind of) defends Trump's tariff policy ... Thirty years after Tiananmen Square, is political reform dead? ... What outsiders don't understand about the oppression of the Uighurs ...

David's new book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet ... Did social media companies treat Alex Jones unfairly? ... Why online censorship is much easier than it was 15 years ago ... Bob proposes a "free market of algorithms" ... Why the Global South loses out ... How Facebook helped Trump's anti-Iran policy ... David: American sensibilities shouldn't dominate online moderation ... The Chinese government's mastery of online control ... International human rights law as a guiding light ...

Bob introduces the idea of Mindful Resistance ... Mindfulness is all about clarity ... Mindfulness as a weapon against Trumpian tribalism ... Buddhism opposes an essentialist view of Trump supporters (and of anything else) ... Salvation of self and salvation of the world ... Question and answer session ...

David's new book, This View of Life ... In what sense, if any, could evolution be conscious? ... The need to complete the Darwinian revolution ... An evolutionary psychology discussion makes Bob tape his mouth shut ... How successful groups avert the tragedy of the commons ... Convergent cultural evolution ... David: Evolution shows that neither laissez faire nor centralized planning works ... A preview of the coming Bob vs. David showdown over group selection ...

Bill's new book, The Social Leap ... Why happiness is fleeting ... Junk food and happy marriages ... How to escape the anxiety of status competition ... Psychological downsides of being a hunter-gatherer ... Why America is more politically tribalized than Australia ... The benefits of self-deception ...

Are we on the road to civilizational collapse? ... Why we need global governance, not global government ... The double-edged sword of civilizational complexity ... The apocalyptic scenario Bob fears most ... Luke: Not every problem has a technical solution ... Bob: Slower technological change would be a blessing ...