Today's guest is the legendary journalist and New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright. He is the author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief; The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; and The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.

Wright talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about The Human Scale, his new novel set in the war-torn Middle East, and why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict keeps burning even as most of the 20th century's conflicts have cooled. They also go deep on Wright's exposés on the war on terror, satanic panics, and how our craving for belief can lead us to madness. Then they turn to Texas, Wright's home state and the place he says is the future of America. What exactly does it mean that we're all becoming more like Lone Star State?

This discussion took place at a live event in New York City.

0:00— Introduction

1:20— Texas: the future of American politics

3:17— 'The Human Scale'

5:38— Why the Israel-Palestine conflict endures

12:12— 'Thirteen Days In September' and the Camp David Accords

23:37— America as both egocentric bully and colony for the rest of the world

26:17— 'Remembering Satan' and the 'recovered memories' panic

33:29— How abortion anxiety may have fueled a moral panic

37:07— Insurance companies ended the panic by denying quack psychiatric treatments

39:15— The will to believe often overrides logic and evidence

40:55— Wright's teenage religious fervor led to interest in Scientology

42:19— How Scientology seduced Hollywood

47:26— 'Going clear' and Scientology backlash

50:03— Getting Paul Haggis on the record about Scientology

52:55— Texas in American mythology

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

All right, Lawrence Wright, late of the Texas Monthly, currently with The New Yorker, and I guess you live in Austin. Do people punch you in the face when you walk down the street because you're at The New Yorker?

Lawrence Wright: Austin is not the usual Texas tow