Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for the New Yorker. He has also written for Rolling Stone and Southern Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta. His history of Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), spent eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was translated into 25 languages. The book was nominated for the National Book Award and won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Wright’s one-man play, My Trip to al-Qaeda, was made into a documentary film and aired on HBO. Wright’s seventh book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief (Knopf 2013), is based on a profile he wrote of the writer-director Paul Haggis in the New Yorker that won the National Magazine Award in 2012.
Articles by Lawrence Wright
Critics call it brutal and barbaric, but it may be the most effective treatment for sex offenders.
To hear some women tell it, nature created two genders, one nearly perfect and the other badly flawed. I wonder whether they’re right.
With the cold war fading into history, Fort Worth’s General Dynamics now has to regard peace as not merely an ideal but an economic reality.
Cycling a hundred miles is a hard enough way to spend a Saturday. It’s even harder in Wichita Falls in August.
How Madalyn Murray O’Hair became the supreme being of the American atheist movement.
The ghosts of bowl games past recall an era when cotton and the Cotton Bowl were king in Texas.
He had a wife and a girlfriend. His ambition was unchecked. He tried to commit suicide. But when I came face to face with the minister of my boyhood church, the sin we talked about was murder.
An agnostic parent is forced to face one of life’s biggest questions.
The Hollywood epics have left Texas, to be replaced by miniatures like Nadine.
Once San Antonio’s elite took pride in their support of the city’s fine symphony. When the cream of that elite, the Symphony Society board, abruptly canceled the upcoming season, it was time for some soul-searching.
Cradle Cap was nothing, diaper rash was a breeze. But when my son brought home head lice—well, it made the plague look good.
When the wife goes back to work and the husband takes on chores and children, the real problem is not laundry or lunch boxes. It’s the battle between love and ambition.
Of course parents do everything they can to protect their children. But at some point they must learn to let go.
When the time comes for the last child in the family to relinquish her tattered baby blanket, she’s not the only one who’s a little shaky about it.
The failed ambitions of the father become the triumphs of the son, or so most fathers would hope.
Every son sees his father as his greatest competitor—until the day he becomes a father himself.
A great man was dead and an outraged world desperately wanted someplace to lay blame. It chose Dallas and changed the city forever.
When armadillos weighed three tons and the long horns were on dinosaurs.
Forget firemen and cowboys, Today’s kid wants to be a superhero.
Houston’s black elite have come a very long way to live in MacGregor Way, the swankiest black neighborhood in Texas, but they still don’t feel safe.
Astronauts used to be dashing pilots. Now they’re doctors, scientists, and...sanitary engineers.
Thomas Thompson won his Blood and Money libel suit, but the trial left one question unanswered: how much of his imagination is a nonfiction writer allowed to use?
And hello to high prices, high interest rates, high rents, and a new low for the American dream.
Better not shout, cry, or pout, ‘cause we’re telling you why, after all these years, Santa Claus is still coming to town.
The Denton millionaire hated drugs and liked cops. He also like Muscles Foster, a footloose cowboy who was one of Texas’ biggest drug runners.