Interview: Lawrence Wright on The Human Scale, the Rise of AI, and The Looming Tower 25 Years Later

Lawrence Wright’s new novel The Human Scale examines the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of a murder mystery. The backbone of the fictional story is the region’s true history, which stretches back for decades before the October 7 attacks reignited all-out war between the territories in 2023. Israel was founded in 1948, the same year that Wright was born (a “young country,” as he described it to reason.com). In the decades since, the territories captured in 1967—including the West Bank and Gaza—have remained at the heart of recurring violence and contested claims.

Wright’s journalistic career in the Middle East began in Egypt, where he taught English at the American University in Cairo. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), Wright has written about the Camp David Accords (the 1979 peace agreement signed between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter) in his book Thirteen Days in September: The Dramatic Story of the Struggle for Peace (2014), as well as the evolution of Al Qaeda’s jihadist movements in his essay collection The Terror Years (2016).

His extensive and diverse catalogue includes both fiction and nonfiction. Wright’s novel The End of October (2020) predicted the COVID-19 pandemic with eerie accuracy. More of his best-known nonfiction includes journalistic exploration into Scientology (Going Clear, 2013), the state of Texas (God Save Texas, 2018), and satanic panic (Remembering Satan, 1994). He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.

In recent interviews about The Human Scale, Wright has spoken extensively about his choice to depict the story as a novel in order to further understand a seemingly irresolvable conflict from both sides. Wright says that a novel allows him to enter the minds of his characters in a way that nonfiction forbids. “Novels are the only art form that can do that,” he said to People Magazine in May 2025. “It’s very powerful.”

Wright wrote The Human Scale not only to further his understanding of a highly nuanced and controversial conflict, but also out of anger and frustration. “What makes it so difficult to solve this problem?” he asked during his speech at the Politics & Prose bookstore. In a dialogue with Elliot Ackerman, Wright has also compared the Israel-Palestine conflict to the Camp David Accords, pointing out that it “…produced a peace agreement that hasn’t been violated a single instance since 1979.” Peace, Wright argues, is possible.

The Human Scale follows Israeli policeman, Yossi Ben-Gal, as he investigates the murder of Chief Weingarten, head of the Israeli police station in Hebron. When American-Palestinian FBI agent, Anthony Malik (reminiscent, in some ways, of Dan Coleman in The Looming Tower), becomes mixed up in the crime, the two are forced to work together in order to get to the truth.

Wright returned to Israel in February 2023 on a fact-checking trip, during which Palestinian peace activist Issa Amro was assaulted in front of him by an Israeli Defense Forces officer (the incident was filmed by Belgian photographer Bénédicte Desruelles). That same year, Wright already had a completed first draft of The Human Scale when the October 7 attacks happened, causing him to restructure the book, which now ends with the incursions. The Human Scale is a poignant look into the violence and brutality that plagues both sides of the conflict, offering a clear entry point into a complicated conflict for its readers.

Porter House Review sat down with Wright to discuss The Human Scale, the rise of AI in the literature/publishing industry, and a potential 20th-anniversary edition of his most famous book, The Looming Tower. Wright is now working on a project concerning the seven women on death row in Texas and the convent of nuns that regularly visits them.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

PHR: I understand that [The Human Scale] used to be a one-man play originally.

LW: And I was the one man. It was directed by Oscar Eustis at the Public Theater in New York. And then we took it to Tel Aviv, and I did it there. I enjoyed that experience quite a lot. I was in Gaza during that same time that Gilad Shalit had been captured, and he hadn’t been returned when I was there [Shalit was a young Israeli serviceman who was captured by Palestinian militants and held hostage for over five years. After several unsuccessful attempts by Israeli forces to locate him (including Operation Summer Rains, a large-scale military invasion into southern Gaza), he was released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including many serving life sentences for deadly attacks against Israelis]. But the deal on the table was a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli, and that just really struck me—that one individual life could be equal to a thousand.

And I thought: I’ve been living with this dilemma about the Middle East for my entire life, but I never really thought that the desperate valuation of human life was at the bottom of it, and that really opened my eyes. And, of course, it’s an almost insoluble problem that way.

PHR: You said, “Hollywood isn’t ready for a story like this.” What does “readiness” mean to you in that context, and do you think literature as a medium can reach people in ways that visual media still resists?

LW: Let’s take it in two parts, because when I wrote the novel, I had written a draft of it before October 7. I was back in Israel in February ’23, mainly for fact-checking purposes, and then October 7 came along. And I thought: I’ll have to take it into account. I knew that it was dangerous as a topic. But I just didn’t see a way to avoid it. So I wrote it with October 7 in it.

I remember, with writing The Looming Tower about the attacks on America—it was extremely sensitive. People felt very strongly about it. And you have to treat these things with immaculate care because, just like 9/11, in Israel, there was a deep wound. Anybody that touches it is regarded as insensitive or exploiting. So I had to take all of that into account. I’m sure that Hollywood took that into account, too. And typically, in the past—I don’t know how true this is any longer—there was more room in fiction than in Hollywood. Like theater, it’s expected that you can test the boundaries. Actually, there is some interest now. So I don’t know if enough time has passed or the possibility of a peace treaty is making people feel a little more open to exploring what happened before October 7. I hope so. I’d like for it to have that kind of treatment.

PHR: To me, this didn’t read like a hopeful book. Do you see elements of hope in this book? And if so, where? And if not, is that the point? Is the recognition of hopelessness trying to impart a moral clarity on your readers?

LW: It’s not a hopeful book. One of the lessons I learned from spending so much time in The Middle East is that things can always get worse. And it’s sad to see.

And every time peace has gotten close in the past—Camp David Accords, the Clinton Outreach, Oslo Accords—the violent side arises and they torpedo it. But the thing is, everybody knows it’s going to happen. It always happens. They say, well, we’re going to make peace, but we know that it’s not going to happen because eventually, we’re going to be fighting again. But it’s a war between extremists.

I think after this catastrophe that has unfolded since October 7, things have become more fluid. I felt very strongly that the world needs to be more involved in this because these people can’t solve peace by themselves. And it has to be enforced in some way, because soon there will be actors who are going to try to throw this all over. Both in Netanyahu’s coalition and the remaining Hamasniks. They’re going to do everything they can to subvert it because they exist only because of the state of war. And in a state of peace, they don’t have any power.

PHR: Without spoiling too much, what was the big pivotal shift of the original draft versus the final ending?

LW: After October 7, I thought: the toll is greater. There had to be sacrifices made. And I think that was the right resolution for it, because you have to see the real human cost. And that is that wonderful people are lost in this.

It’s totally a tragedy in every respect. But I had to look at it through a realistic perspective. What would really happen? And the truth is these horrible things do happen, and that’s why this conflict is so dire.

It’s hard for people to look at the truth. It’s heartbreaking and savage. It also reflects on human nature. And it’s not that the Israelis and the Palestinians are a special breed of person—they’re just the people that happen to be in the region that is in this state of conflict.

PHR: You also had that incident where Issa Amro was assaulted in front of you.

LW: That was so shocking. I mean, it really brought it home—this kind of brutality. I mean, had I not been there, he might have killed Issa.

There had been a Palestinian killed nearby by an IDF soldier not too many months before I visited. So it wasn’t out of the question. But when some of his army buddies tried to break it up—first of all, I had been trying to get them to. I could see that this was going south really quickly. And they were obviously afraid of their other soldier. He was a big kid, and he was full of wrath. And something about seeing that kind of outbreak right in front of me and not being able to do anything about it… Although, I think my presence there might have eventually made a difference. It’s hard to know.

It’s just I can’t imagine what they would have done had I not been there. Obviously, having not just me, but this Belgian photographer that was with us—she was filming it. Here we have two Westerners standing right there watching it, filming it, and telling them to stop. And it went so far.

Had he not been pulled aside finally by some of the other soldiers, I don’t know what he would have done.  In fact, the truth is that incidents like this happen all the time. And punishment doesn’t follow.

So, I was called to visit the Israeli Defense Force headquarters in Tel Aviv. The central command is a group that handles Gaza and the West Bank. And the general there wanted to talk to me and assure me that ‘we don’t do this sort of thing.’ But you did. And there’s a long list of other incidents where the army just stands by or actually assists in these kinds of assaults.

And so, that troubles me. It’s not just random acts by West Bank settlers, but it is part of Israeli policy. And unless it can be shown that they were going to stand in the way of that kind of outbreak, then I think that they are in effect supporting it.

PHR: What are your strategies for managing to carry momentum through such a history-rich book?

LW: Research is always a factor, even in my fiction. I want the reader to think, ‘oh, this could really happen,’ or it really did happen, or ‘it feels very real.’ And for me, finding out what the world is really like—the universe that I’m trying to write about—what actually happens there? Who are these people? What do they believe? What do they have for breakfast? Who are their friends? Just try to understand them as fully as possible.

I use note cards. You see these boxes up here. Those are full of notecards of two projects that I’ve been working on right now. And I outline. This is true of nonfiction and fiction. Sometimes when I’m working on a play or a movie, I have my note cards, and I will write out scene ideas. Or even character things that I want to do and just toss them in a pile—until the pile’s so thick. And then, if it’s a play, I’ll divide it into two acts. And if it’s a movie, I’ll divide it into three acts. I close the door, and I just put these things out on the floor.

When you do that, it’s very much like if you see a writer’s room for a series, or something like that. They use note cards in that same way. And you can see gaps, or ‘there’s just too much action in this part.’ ‘I need to fill in over here.’ And you move the cards around, add new cards, get new ideas continually.  And then when I feel like I’ve got a structure, I put it up on the whiteboard. And I like the whiteboard because I can reference it from my desk. I can look over and see where I am and then move around, try to find how to get from one place to another.

It’s helpful to know where you’re headed. I think what defeats most aspiring writers—especially the young ones—is frustration. It’s just very frustrating. And the first draft is the most frustrating thing. I can’t imagine anything in life more frustrating than trying to get a first draft of your work. And then when you finally have that, what people think of as writing really starts, because you can begin to polish the dialogue and invent new plot ideas and introduce new characters that might help things along. And that is much more fun. But you just have to get through that first draft, because it’s hideous.

PHR: A lot of young writers are held back by fear. They have a lot of anxiety about trying to attempt controversial subjects. In the beginning of your career, how did you overcome that hesitation to tackle these complex subjects? You’ve touched on that there was still a little bit of fear there while you wrote this book.

LW: When I’m just beginning something, and I’m ignorant… I hate being ignorant. And when you’re in that—especially when you’re starting—you go off and talk to people who are the experts. And the disparity between their vast knowledge and your absence of it—it’s always difficult. But, basically, I like to talk to people.

I like to discover a world. And as always, I guess, if there’s one thing that characterizes my work, I like to enter worlds that are subterranean, like Al Qaeda, or Scientology, or recently, death row—women’s death row and a convent. They’re all separate universes, and they’re rarely explored. But there are great stories locked up inside them. And so getting into getting permission to enter the door on those things is the hardest part.

But it’s not impossible. Those are the kinds of stories I tend to be drawn to. And then I like to get in and observe—like the women on death row. Their community that they have—the seven of them—is of interest to me. And then their stories, of course, they’re all various. One of the seven is clearly innocent. And I’m trying to shine some light on that. But they are, for the most part, women who have done one heinous thing in their lives. And it’s not like the men. The men typically have a long history of violence and criminal behavior. But typically with the women, they’ve had this one brutal moment—or, at least, the jury decided that that was true. And they’re not that person anymore. They’ve been in for—some of them—three decades now. And so they’re different people than the woman who committed the crime. And so I have to take those things into account.

This is, again, a book that will, I hope, address people who are in favor of the death penalty and those who are violently opposed, and those who don’t have an opinion. To see the humanity while acknowledging the harm that has been created. I think that I like to try to strike that balance so that it doesn’t feel like I’m pounding an ideology one way or the other. I’m not. I’m just interested in the human stories. And the stories themselves are the tale. They reveal what I want the readers to understand.

PHR: What’s your process for coming up with an extremist character like the Rav and making him seem believable?

LW: Research, to start with. There are historic personalities like Moshe Levinger, who was the founder of that settler colony in Hebron. And the American rabbi that went over there—he got killed by this Egyptian in New York. [Likely refers to Meir Kahane, who was assassinated by El Sayyid Nosair in 1990. Kahane was the founder of the Jewish Defense League.] There are a lot of extremists in Israel. Spiritual leaders of these ultra-orthodox nationalists. And they follow an ideology that the West Bank is their land. And they are entitled to do whatever they need to do to get the Palestinians off of that land. I’ve written about extremists almost all my career.

I wrote about Al Qaeda. And in the movie The Siege, there’s a Muslim terrorist. I taught English at the American University in Cairo for a couple of years. Back then, the ideology wasn’t as fervent as it is now. But the terrorist in The Siege was based on one of my students, who was not a violent person. He just had a quirky personality. I’ve written a lot about religion—some of these religions have some very extreme figures in them. So I’m always interested in why people become the people they are.

Previously, back in the nineties, I was in Israel writing about the red cow. [The “red heifer” is a cow that is biblically required for ancient Jewish purification rituals. In Jewish tradition, a red heifer is sacrificed, and its ashes are mixed with water to create a purifying agent, enabling people to regain ritual purity. In recent years, there have been efforts to breed red heifers in Israel, as many believe this is a necessary step for the rebuilding of the Third Temple (a hypothetical construction that would serve as the precursor for Jesus Christ’s Second Coming).] And I was hanging out with some pretty extreme rabbis. Some of them were noted for their violent advocacy.

PHR: You mentioned earlier that your novel was already finished when the October 7 attacks happened. After that, you had to rewrite the ending. What is that like for you as an author? You’ve finished this book, but months later, history changes.

LW: “Finish” is always a big question. If you’re a painter, you put paint on your canvas, but it’s hard for a painter to know when he or she is finished, and when to stop painting. And it was a dilemma that I had to take into account—the terrorist attack and the implication of what was going to follow. So it was a challenge. But, actually, I don’t mind being challenged as a writer. If I know what I need to write, I can do it. Usually the path isn’t so clear. In this case, it was obvious to me that if I was going to take it on, I had to invent characters that inhabited that world and were capable of committing those actions.

PHR: Did you have a deadline for your publisher?

LW: When I wrote The Looming Tower, I signed the contract a few months after 9/11, and I was supposed to turn it in a year and two months later. And I turned it in five years later. Your duty is to the work itself. And the publisher was understanding, but demanded to see progress. My publisher was very supportive of it, but it took a whole lot longer to do the book. But I didn’t know what the book was when I signed the contract. All I knew was that I was on a mission, and I was going to get to the bottom of it as much as I could. But I couldn’t do it in a year and two months.

PHR: Have you ever thought about doing a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The Looming Tower?

LW: Yeah. Funny—we are talking about that.

PHR: Has your perspective changed at all?

LW: Yeah. I mean, the question that I would pose in there is: “did Bin Laden win?” Because you look around the world, and the Taliban are back in power. An Al Qaeda leader is running Syria now. And there are Al Qaeda chapters and other terrorist organizations all over certain parts of the world, especially Africa. And the training camps are back open in Afghanistan. So it was hard to declare that we won. And that’s very troubling to me, because I think people believe that terrorism is part of the past, but it’s a part of human nature. And so we’re not going to see the end of it.

PHR: You mentioned in one of your interviews about how it’s been a relatively peaceful era for America since 9/11.

LW: Although there have been a ton of attempts, and there have been lower-scale and Al Qaeda-inspired or ISIS-inspired actions. And so it’s a continual drumbeat.

PHR: You’ve seen the publishing industry evolve—and devolve, in some ways. If you were starting out today as an author, how do you think you would approach trying to break into the publishing industry? And do you have any advice for students like the ones in my program who are starting out?

LW: It’s a very difficult time in publishing. It’s linked to a lot of things. There’s a decline in reading, which is stark. And it’s matched also to the decline in the ability to read, at least comprehensively enough to enjoy a novel or nonfiction book. It’s just stark.

And so, our readers are turning on TV or going to the movies–or not so much that anymore. But their minds are full of other things, Twitter and the news. I think Trump has colonized our minds so much that it’s hard to think of anything else. And that makes it very difficult to write something that commands an audience in the midst of all this noise in the society we’re living in now. And that’s a real challenge.

PHR: And you can ask AI to write your book, and it will. And do it in, like, thirty seconds. So that challenges the idea of individual creativity.

LW: It does. Although, I think of all the expressions of literature that journalism is less threatened than others, because the machine itself won’t go out and gather new information and interview people and so on. So the journalist brings new information. And it happens to have been my path. But the advantage that I think that one gains from being a journalist is that you know how the world works. You learn how to talk to people. You school yourself in your ability to meet anybody and try to see where they’re coming from. And those are valuable skills for a novelist. And I think it’s also that I write movies, plays, and everything, pretty much. But all of them cross-fertilize. With a play or a movie, there’s no narrative. It’s just scenes and characters. Those are very valuable tools for a nonfiction writer, too. And the nonfiction writer can offer the playwriter or the scriptwriter the skill of finding out what really happens in the world.

I wrote a play about the making of the movie Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton being the main characters. And Rex Harrison is the villain. So I had a lot of fun. We had a couple of productions of that. But I had all these books about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. There were still people alive that knew about it. And so I would talk to them and gain new insights. And I would find it’s a dialogue. What did Burton actually say? And what did Elizabeth Taylor say when she took the sleeping pills to kill herself, or all these things.

The language. It’s just so valuable. If you can imagine each of those sentences being a destination, like, let’s say a stone that you put in the water. You’re trying to walk across the river or the creek. And so you see this delicious commentary from one of your characters. How do I get from here to there? And they’ve become a pathway to get across this across the creek. And it adds a sense of reality that I don’t think the imagination can match.

PHR: I was excited about AI as a tool for research, but there’s a lot of questions about the ethics now. If you use the AI to tell you what type of gun this character would use in this scene, does that devalue your work?

LW: I think that’s nobody’s business but yours. You use what tools you can to make the product as good as you can. Nobody’s going to give you a merit badge for ignoring AI. It’s a fact now. A friend of mine is writing about East Germany, and he wanted his character to have immigrated from East Germany in the early part of the nineteenth century. And in this little town, what would this woman be doing? And AI said, well, it’s noted for its embroidery. So she might have been embroidering. It’s on the river, and she could have been selling canoes, or something like that. They were much better examples than the one I just offered. They were based on the real economy of this actual town in 1822 East Germany. And if the machine learns about your character, it can also take that into consideration.

So those are prompts that you give it, and it prompts you back. And I think the final product is the proof in the pudding. It does diminish the sense of authenticity. And I don’t see a way around that. I think we’re in a period where it also creates a lot of fraud and counterfeiting. And a friend of mine—or one of the writers I’ve met—just wrote a bestselling book about the murders inside an army base and got on the Times bestseller list. All these copycat things come out immediately after. They just feed his book in it, change a few details, and it’s his book, but the reader may not know what’s real and what’s not. And it’s robbery.

And I don’t think the publishing industry is doing anything to protect the writers. I mean, they’re losing money, too. But I’ve heard that Amazon, on that self-publishing thing [Kindle Direct Publishing], reduced the number of submissions that a person can make of a new book. It gives you a sense of the scale. At least, that’s what I heard. Our literary community is self-destructing.