The Point Magazine
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A magazine founded on the suspicion that modern life is worth examining. Join our newsletter: https://t.co/TdCrVktZfd Subscribe: https://t.co/O0WjHAAxpo
Chicago, IL
Joined December 2010
Issue 30 | Summer 2023.What is beauty for?.Featuring a rare all-editors symposium.Coming soon.
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In this world Trump represented “freedom,” but what this meant was less a radical disruption of the status quo by an emergent political constituency with its own set of priorities and more a reanimation of the deepest and oldest of American fantasies.
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“She wanted philosophy to begin with lived experience, and the aspect of lived experience that obsessed her from the start was otherness.” New online, @TorilMoi on Simone de Beauvoir’s investigations of otherness, from “L’Invitée” to “The Second Sex”:
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“The earthquake exposed the gangrene that has been eating away at Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey,’” writes @kayagenc. Will this finally be the crisis that ends Erdoğan’s grip on the country?
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Introducing our Quarantine Journal: Notes from Inside—a new series of dispatches about life during the coronavirus crisis:.
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We're very pleased to announce a new podcast series hosted by @JessSwoboda and Zach Fine called "Selected Essays," where we invite on essayists to discuss their favorite under-the-radar essays.
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Coming soon:.Issue 29 | What is tech for?. 224 pages of non-artificial intelligence.
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We're very proud to announce the Program for Public Thinking at @UChicago, dedicated to promoting a more thoughtful, humane, and pluralistic public conversation. First on our agenda: the Summer Workshop!
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It’s orientation time. Issue 25 | What is college for?.Coming soon.
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“Are elites rapacious capitalists? Or judicious elders managing class compromise?” New online, @jcolinbradley on Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari’s new books, and the tension at the heart of post-liberal political thought:
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Elif Batuman’s essay “Who Killed Tolstoy?” pulls back the veil of literary criticism, @laurenoyler says in the latest episode of Selected Essays, and makes you acknowledge what a lot of reading and criticism is about: solving a mystery.
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“Fosse grabs hold of us, intellectually and physiologically, and asks that we cleave to a state of mind largely lost to secular modernity: paying attention.” New online, @benlibman on the ritual repetitions of Jon Fosse:
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For Stuart Hall, Marxism wasn’t .self-sufficient doctrine; it was an unfinished research program that had to be carried forward through original, undogmatic study of its classical texts and the new historical contexts within which they were being read.
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Here are the top 10 most popular essays on The Point website this year: on jealousy and pain, race and religion, the postcolonial syllabus and postmodern politics, careerism and elitism—and what college is for:
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Truth-seekers, take note: we have just launched a new podcast, “What Is X?” hosted by @jehsmith. (It’s basically a hybrid of a Socratic dialogue and “The Price Is Right.”) Check out the first episode, with special guest @AgnesCallard:
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“I felt a sharp spur of grief, just over my breastbone. This happened all the time in the archive. I kept on mourning things that weren’t even mine to remember.” New online, Rowan Wilson on communion with the dead and the living in Cologne’s gay archive:.
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“We have created a community, one that can’t be replaced by an app or replicated through other institutions’ online offerings.” New on Forms of Life, @LMDiBartolomeo on what will be lost with the West Virginia University program cuts:.
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“Despite the dire reports of the state of the humanities, there is a humanistic revival in higher education underway—it’s just happening where few commentators think to look.” Ted Hadzi-Antich on teaching the Great Questions at a community college:
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The question asked in today’s Higher Gossip, writes Lillian Fishman, “speeds to the crux of how we understand sex now: as a problem of performance.”
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“One way of re-engaging King is to read him in the way we would thinkers like Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey—as interested in fundamental moral principles.” @tommie_shelby talks to @jcljules about MLK's philosophical legacy:.
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“Elon Musk barely exists. He’s just the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson.”.
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We’re sad to learn of the death of literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant. For our “What is America For?” symposium, Berlant talked to @beamalsky about political emotions and their intellectual formation—a dialogue we return to often.
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Looks like we *just* made it on the list of Best Books of 2017 with our fellow "shoestring publications" and, in the words of Pankaj Mishra, are "far more intellectually agile and resourceful than their rich cousins.". The little magazines truck on.
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Gillian Rose understood the desire to make politics “safe” as a natural response to the horrors of the twentieth century, but also as a misleading way to conceptualize political life, which in turn perpetuates “a piety that separates itself from history.” .
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Issue 20: What are children for?.Due September 2019.
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Revisit @theorygurl in conversation with @a_n_a_berg on the relation between feminism and transphobia: “I sort of love the idea that TERFs have no idea how much I agree with them about things. Not everything, but a number of things.”
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“It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles.” New on the site, @jehsmith on writing, algorithms, and “the discourse.”
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Congratulations to critic and Point editor Becca Rothfeld this morning on the announcement of her TWO-BOOK DEAL!.
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Issue 26 is coming soon—check out our annotated TOC for a look inside the issue:
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We’re very excited to announce that “The Opening of the American Mind”—The Point’s first essay collection—will be published next month with @UChicagoPress and is now available for preorder!
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On the new episode of Selected Essays, @_ryanruby_ talks to Zach Fine and @JessSwoboda about Susan Sontag’s “Approaching Artaud” and the art of the single-author essay: .
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“How could Habermas provoke so much outrage by arguing in such a deliberative way?” New online, @brthe_muhlff on Habermas, the German arms debate, and the desire for political action:.
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Introducing Issue 24, with essays on Marilynne Robinson and race, Patricia Lockwood and modernism, Tana French and Zillow, the logic of the like, non-ideal theory, the Black Convention Movement, and much, much more! Annotated TOC here:
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“Oppenheimer wasn’t the only ambitious film about destructive technology to come out this year. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a much smaller production with no Oscar nominations to its name and a story far less grand, but to me more real than Nolan’s epic.”.
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What can Augustine teach us about an alternative Christian economic ethic? Is all we have the prosperity gospel? .No, according to @ebruenig .
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Is the prosperity gospel all there is to a Christian economic ethic? Elizabeth Bruenig argues for a charitable alternative.
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"Liberal modernity is on the whole a story of the progressive abstraction of power: from the divine right of kings, to the representative rule of republican assemblies, to the fully anonymous and impersonal hegemony of markets.".
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"Houellebecq’s critics have convinced themselves that the Islamic tradition agrees with them. It does not." http://t.co/fS2ExbozW4
@nybooks.
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"How right Cato was when he said: . 'Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.'" —Arendt. Have a relaxing 4th! #thehammockcondition
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If you saw Weezer on their 2001 tour, you've surely heard of @ozmaofficial. @emilieshumway reflects on listening to Ozma in her teen years, and how now it helps her recall what it's like to be young—that is, to allow yourself to feel, unguardedly.
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“Does our ordinary experience of life—both our own, and our close associates’—show us evil? No, not really. Life is censored.”.New online, @AgnesCallard’s “simple theory” of what art is for: .
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“White self-flagellation still holds considerable currency, as does the idea that intending to redress harm is the same as actually doing so.” New online, @o_rinocoflow on the relevance and risk of Jim Jones’s anti-racist politics: .
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Tabling at Brooklyn Book Festival all day today in booth 304. Go cheer Jon up.
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Congratulations to Point editor @jduesterberg for winning a Whiting grant for his forthcoming book—based on his definitive deep dive into the “Dark Enlightenment” from issue 14.
Congratulations to @jduesterberg, recipient of a 2024 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for the book FINAL FANTASY: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE PRESENT! Read more about his work here:
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"Church is not a place where we go to profess our virtue, but one where we go to confess our lack of it.". From our newest issue on "What is Church for?", @Tish_H_Warren traces her experience in church—from hiding in it as a child, to becoming a priest.
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What you’ll find in issue 25. subscribe to read it all:
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"Augustine realized that the Christian religion would not belong to the sainted few." Now unpaywalled from our new issue, @ebruenig on how Augustine revolutionized the way we think about wealth and inequality:
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Tonight Becca Rothfeld leaves her husband to join the Callard household. Livestream here:
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“When I write fiction, when it’s working, I feel a sort of wild, anarchic freedom, one that opens a gulf between my work and my compulsion to bear witness.” — @PhilKlay in our new issue. Read our annotated TOC for more sneak peeks:
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Big day for the country. Today is the official publication day for our first book of essays "The Opening of the American Mind," out now from @UChicagoPress!
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In an ideal society, there would be no elite colleges, or at least not in their current form.
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From the shores of Lake Michigan we travel to the SF Bay, where @CityLightsBooks has stood since Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin founded it in 1953. Glad to have a place on the shelves of the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore! Pick up a copy of Issue 16 today.
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“Do Democrats really expect nineteen-year-olds, who have never lived in anything but Trump’s America, to hear their empty promises of a return to ‘normalcy’ and get excited?” New on Forms of Life, @dolanmart_in on his generation’s swing to the right:.
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What are intellectuals for?.The Point weighs in. Coming in April:
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“When it comes to the question of whose job it is to conform to whom, the sign has gotten reversed.” A new column from @AgnesCallard on the rise of “acceptance parenting.”
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It’s the end of an era, for us and for Twitter: our classic Bad at Twitter tote bags are nearly sold out! We’re giving them away to the first fifteen people who subscribe to the magazine:.
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“If you’d asked me why philosophy assuaged my midlife crisis, I could only say that I got lucky,” writes @KieranSetiya. But now, he’s closer to a theory of philosophy as self-help:.
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Introducing Issue 17: What is prison for?.Subscribe today to get it straight from the printer:
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“.@uchicagogsu would not have gone forward with this action if we had not known that the undergrads had our back. They are not being instrumentalized; they are with us—and they know why they are.”.
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From our latest issue, @ebruenig takes historical cues from Augustine and explores how "a genuinely Christian economic ethic could form in the 21st century".
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The first, by Mana Afsari, is a dispatch from last summer and fall in Washington, D.C., with a focus on the younger right-wing men for whom Donald Trump has become a “great man” of American politics—and the center of their own aspirations for the future.
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The late night hosts make us laugh, but do they distract us from what is truly funny?
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“Perhaps the past that I want to bring into the future is a naïve fantasy that reimagined unsatisfactory reactions into satisfying ones.” New for Reading Room, @omweekes on reading James Baldwin and Brandon Taylor to prepare for post-vaccine socializing:.
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The “Anthropocene” appears to be nothing but the playing out of a previous dispensation. It forces upon us an experience of time not unlike what the early Christians must have felt: what will happen in the future has already taken place in the past.
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"On every picket I have walked, undergrads walked with us. Is it at all surprising to see those undergrads turn out to the picket lines for the people who have been there for them?" David Kretz, a @uchicagogsu member, responds to @AgnesCallard:.
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“It’s not that he has a beautiful prose style. It’s not that he is creating an intelligible multi-language. It is that he is living at a degree of extremity in extremis that few people do. And it is her aim to track the movements of that kind of thinking.”.
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"Nothing I can see in American culture today frames the use of wealth as an arena for the education of the soul.". @ebruenig argues that we should.
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Do writers have a moral responsibility to speak out against oppression and abuses of power? What makes a political novel good? Join @_ryanruby_ and Becca Rothfeld for a discussion of these questions and more in an event this Monday:.
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Did you miss our conversation with @_ryanruby_ and Becca Rothfeld on the political novel earlier this week? An audio recording of the event is now online:.
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The history of philosophy is full of philosophers denouncing complaint, from Aristotle to Kant to Nietzsche. Yet there was one philosopher, Simone Weil, who saw complaint as beautiful—even sacred.
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"The teenagers often ask me, 'Aren’t you sad that you will never have sex?' I answer: 'Yes, a part of me is sad about that, but it is not a hopeless sadness.'". @sancrucensis in our issue 23 symposium, What is Sex for?
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Introducing Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life, featuring @sarahchihaya, @mervatim, @kjavadizadeh and @taubrybaruch. First up, @sarahchihaya on deciding what to read now:.
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"The story of Franz Jägerstätter, as told by Terrence Malick, is a Passion narrative; a narrative of a witness; a mystery.". New online, @ayjay on "A Hidden Life," and what reviewers have missed about it:.
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In the issue 29 annotated TOC: the tech symposium, @AntonJaegermm on our hyperpolitical present, @kathytchow on paranoid romantic scripts and more:.
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“Willful confrontation with pity and fear are not our specialty, nor will they become so in the foreseeable future.” New online, @ianmcorbin1 on the art of dying today:.
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On the new episode of Selected Essays, @JessSwoboda and Zach Fine talk to Michael Clune about Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and how to write literature that captures the rhythm of consciousness:.
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"Hitz insists that—rather than being a pastime for aristocrats—the real value of the life of the mind is most evident to those marked by marginalization, disenfranchisement and poverty."
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The term comes from @AntonJaegermm, who wrote about our "hyperpolitical" era in issue 23 of The Point:
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We are saddened to hear of the passing of renowned Marxist scholar Erik Olin Wright. In his memory, we’ve unlocked his essay from issue 5, about his vision of “social empowerment” and how to make a better world:
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New on our website: @tommie_shelby and @jcljules on Martin Luther King's forgotten contributions to philosophical thought.
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"For Teju, to be in control was an exercise in fairness, balanced with pragmatism; a temperance that was actively solicitous, so unwilling to push himself to the limelight." . New on the site, @iwalesino pays tribute to Tejumola Olaniyan:.
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Congratulations to Point editor @jessedmccart, and the other finalists!.
Congratulations to the finalists for the NBCC Award for Criticism: Jenny Diski, Melissa Febos, Jesse McCarthy, Mark McGurl, and Amia Srinivasan!
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“What might literary studies gain if we allow ourselves to be moved not just by a text but also by another person’s interpretation of it?” @JessSwoboda on postcritique and literary community:
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Thirty-second TikTok videos, two-sentence Twitter posts, hour-long Netflix episodes, each autoplaying endlessly into an infinite narrative mesh: these encounters no longer punctuate the day but rather constitute the medium through which the day unfolds.
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“What gets us going is a compelling main character facing many years in prison, not several million pigs spending a lifetime in circumstances that make prison look comparatively relaxing.” Point contributor @Elizabbarber on animal liberation, for @Harpers:.
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Chicago! We're out at Printers Row Lit Fest today, right by the main stage in booth JJ, with lots of back issues, subscription deals and literary gossip. Come by!
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“Dropping the neurobiological and moralistic justifications around ADHD would help a lot of people, but so too would changing the social imperatives and circumstances that spur amphetamine use.” Benjamin Y. Fong on the Adderall shortage:.
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“Nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle” wrote @theorygurl. @amiasrinivasan responded that there’s a moral duty to render our desires less unjust. In an interview with @a_n_a_berg Andrea Long Chu responds:
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“This is the comfortless lesson at the heart of Portis’s hilarious, huge-hearted novel: not even salvation lasts forever.” New online, @my19thcentury on the comedy and the philosophy of Charles Portis:
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We're proud to announce our list of the most popular essays of 2021:
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"In significant ways trying to live by the Christian story has made my life harder . So why not choose a different story?" This Christmas, read @Tish_H_Warren on believing the Christian story is true, from our new issue's church symposium.
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Founded in 1976 as the first bookstore/cafe in Washington, DC, @kramerbooks is one of the city's most beloved bookstores. One more reason to love them: they carry issue 16!
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Q: What has surprised you most about college?.A: Just how wealthy some people are and the cognitive dissonance that comes from it.
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Code fetishism results in the desire to achieve “a machinelike calibration of human relations, one in which actually existing humans, flawed and fickle as we tend to be, appear as glitches and disruptions,” @LMSacasas writes.
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