Politics, human nature, and tips on averting the apocalypse
The NonZero Newsletter is your home for analysis and reporting about the biggest challenges facing humanity today. Our team, led by journalist and author Robert Wright, brings you insights into world affairs, domestic politics, and the deeper forces that shape them, including human psychology and rapid technological advance.
Why the name?
Life is full of non-zero-sum games—situations that can have a win-win outcome or a lose-lose outcome, depending on how we handle them. A lot of those “games” are now being played among the world’s nations. They come in such forms as climate change, potentially catastrophic arms races (nuclear, AI, weapons in space, etc.), and pandemics and other global health challenges.
If the nations of the world don’t cooperate to meet these and other challenges—don’t achieve win-win outcomes—things could go downhill fast. Our goal is to make those positive outcomes more likely, often by highlighting the impediments to reaching them, ranging from short-sighted foreign policy to domestic political polarization.
We come at this from a few angles, including human psychology. The policies we need at the national and international levels won’t materialize if people keep acting like… well, if they keep acting the way people have long acted. You know: the people who brought us the Vietnam and Iraq wars? And the people who—on both the red and blue sides of America’s political divide—achieve social media alpha status by caricaturing and denigrating people on the other side, deepening the antagonism between red and blue? We are all subject to the subtle psychological forces that foment conflict, so we all need to become more aware of them.
If these sound like big problems, it’s because they are. But we’re determined to take them on and do our part to make the world a better place. We hope you’ll join us.
What do paid subscribers get?
Paid subscribers (aka NZN members) enjoy access to a range of exclusive content, including full versions of all Nonzero articles and essays. Members also get the paywalled portion of The Earthling, our Friday roundup of stories from around the globe that we find intriguing, inspiring, or—sometimes—deeply aggravating.
In addition, NZN members get lots of exclusive audio and video content, such as “overtime” segments of podcast episodes, early access to certain conversations, and audio versions of selected essays. Members can also join periodic Zoom AMAs with NZN founder Robert Wright.
Of course, NZN members also get the satisfaction of knowing they’re helping to keep this whole tribalism-opposing, cognitive-empathy-enhancing, and (we hope) apocalypse-averting project going.
Our team
Robert Wright is the editor-in-chief of NonZero. You may know Bob from his books, including Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and, most recently, Why Buddhism is True. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages and two have been New York Times bestsellers. His 2009 book The Evolution of God was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction.
You may also know Bob from his shockingly long history of magazine writing (New Yorker, Atlantic, Time, etc., even back when they had only physical incarnations) or his shockingly long history of podcasting: He co-founded Bloggingheads.tv in 2005 and has been at it ever since. His twice-weekly podcast, formerly known as The Wright Show, got a new name in 2022: Robert Wright’s Nonzero.
When Bob isn’t taping podcast episodes or writing for the newsletter, he’s working on a book about artificial intelligence that touches on lots of NonZeroish themes—like whether the world’s nations can get their act together and guide AI cooperatively and constructively.
Connor Echols is the managing editor of NonZero. Connor came to NonZero by way of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he worked as a reporter covering global conflicts, the arms trade, and other fun stuff. His work has also appeared in the New Arab, the Intercept, and Injustice Watch, among other outlets.
Based in Washington, DC, Connor writes about the people and ideas that drive American foreign policy. Connor’s a bit of a peacenik, but he’s not all bad: When he’s not taking shots at the Blob, you can usually find him reading about Middle Eastern history, watching professional cycling, or playing surprisingly violent video games.
Andrew Day is staff writer at NonZero. Andrew earned a PhD in political science at Northwestern University and has taught at both the university and high school levels. His writings on US foreign policy have appeared in the Week, the American Conservative, the National Interest, and other outlets. Andrew lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife, baby daughter, and a large pit bull mix that the shelter promised was a Labrador.
Clark McGillis is an associate producer at NonZero. Clark has a degree from Carleton University in Interactive Multimedia Design and lives in Canada, on the Ontario side of the Ontario-Québec border (oui, il parle français).
In his non-NonZero hours, Clark likes to doodle, play ball hockey, design board games, and spend time with his fiancée and two cats. He less likes having to constantly defend his Neoplatonic-Jungian-Advaitic-Idealist-Socialist views online—but someone’s gotta do it.
How do I contact the NZN team?
You can email NZN at nonzero.news@gmail.com.
