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Robert Wright

Robert Wright - Robert Wright is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of The Evolution of God, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. More

Robert Wright is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of The Evolution of God, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wright is also a fellow at the New America Foundation and editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv. His other books include Nonzero, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book in 2000 and included on Fortune magazine's list of the top 75 business books of all-time. Wright's best-selling book The Moral Animal was selected as one of the ten best books of 1994 by The New York Times Book Review.Wright has contributed to The Atlantic for more than 20 years. He has also contributed to a number of the country's other leading magazines and newspapers, including: The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Time, and Slate, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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How to Decide Who to Root For in the Super Bowl

By Robert Wright

Feb 4 2012, 7:47 PM ET Comment

If you don't pay much attention to football during the regular season, you may now be trying to figure out who to root for in the Super Bowl.

I can help! I'm not a regular-season fan either, so I've devised a simple four-point formula to help me choose my allegiance. 

1) All other things being equal, root for the underdog.

2) All other things being equal, root against a team that has a known cheater as its coach.

3) All other things being equal, root against a team whose quarterback has political aspirations and lent valuable symbolic support to a president who a year earlier had launched a disastrous war that would damage America's national security for years to come.

4) All other things being equal, root against a team whose quarterback has so little imagination that he marries a supermodel and builds a supermansion.

Some years there is tension among these four criteria. But not this year! Go Giants.



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