The Point

thepointmag.com

Philosophy and criticism for non-philosophers. Long essays on everyday life, art, and politics, often using continental theory without showing off.

511 articles0 followers

Recent articles

The Point

Meaning a Life | The Point Magazine

Along with George’s Selected Letters, Meaning a Life is the only prose account of the Oppens’ composite life as they understood it. Inside that story Mary has nested another—a rare story of imagination, companionship and love becoming mysteriously and beautifully aligned.

John PalattellaOct 19, 202018 min read

The Point

The Group | The Point Magazine

If McCarthy’s critics thought the Vassar girls were pitifully naïve and shallow—about sex as about many other things—they might have recognized that what happens to any of these women cannot ruin the faith they have and the pleasure they take in their own experiences; and in this alone they must have had more to teach us than they were ever given credit for.

Apoorva TadepalliOct 19, 202018 min read

The Point

On Integration | The Point Magazine

Not only was Cruse dubious about the plausibility of eradicating prejudice from the souls of whites, but he believed that such a project—inevitably focused on interracial settings and the individuals who inhabit them—was of little concrete use to the largely unintegrated communities that were, and still are, paying the steepest price for the country’s discriminatory history.

Jesse McCarthy, Jon BaskinOct 19, 202019 min read

The Point

We All Deserve to Heal | The Point Magazine

Even when we are not providing the sympathetic ear for personal stories, the work of sex work is active listening.

Yin QOct 19, 202013 min read

The Point

Lovers in the Hands of a Patient God | The Point Magazine

It was hard for me to believe, at first, that spiritual debates in the American colonies, say, or the conventions of mass-market storytelling could tell me anything about my love life. But they did. How had I missed it? Probably because what they have to offer is so counterintuitive,and maybe even something of a scandal: that here in America, the Land of the Will, it can be good—very good, crucially important even—not to will.

S. G. BelknapOct 19, 202063 min read

The Point

Issue 23 | The Point Magazine

The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 23. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe now. […]

The EditorsOct 19, 20205 min read

The Point

American Nightmares | The Point Magazine

In the most basic sense, when we first confront powerful images we say that we are out of words, right? All of a sudden we don’t know what to say. Or we say they take our breath away. We can’t just immediately articulate what is happening. We feel called by the encounter with the image to say something, yet we also feel that we are losing speech.

Eyal Peretz, Anastasia BergOct 19, 202021 min read

The Point

Museum Lover | The Point Magazine

I had forgotten to ask Louis whether to use the formal vous or the familiar tu in a sex club. Usually you use vous for strangers, but what if you were allowing the stranger’s husband to put your hand on his cock?

Erin ThompsonOct 19, 202010 min read

The Point

Dismissal | The Point Magazine

The lesson of the Cultural Revolution is that an emancipatory politics is indeed possible, but also fragile and precarious—and under constant threat by the logic of dismissal.

Asad HaiderOct 21, 202030 min read

The Point

“The Horror Is in You” | The Point Magazine

I refuse to begin this essay with Ingeborg Bachmann’s death—the cigarette that set fire to her apartment in Rome while she was sleeping, the three […]

Reed McConnellOct 17, 202015 min read

The Point

Monocle Men | The Point Magazine

Monocle prides itself on providing a rare “optimistic tone” through “the darkest hours of a sagging economy.” Nowhere is this tone better expressed than in four landmark publications, released sporadically over the last few years … These books offer a break from “hectoring voices” and a stylish tour of the world the typical Monocle reader would like to live in, not to mention a note of reassurance for the kind of man who is concerned about the security and virtue of his white-collar job, but even more concerned about where he can find a decent pair of brogues.

Ollie CussenJul 20, 201612 min read

The Point

Restless Minds | The Point Magazine

This is the third column in the third round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond to a prompt […]

Claire JarvisOct 12, 202010 min read

The Point

Wisdom That Is Woe | The Point Magazine

My acceptance of philosophy as a way of living never transformed into a source of worldly comfort, and the unsettling gap between thinking and living never closed.

Joseph M. KeeginOct 7, 202016 min read

The Point

Infinite Jest | The Point Magazine

This is the fourth in a series of columns on political life by James Duesterberg; read more here. The good thing about movies is that […]

James DuesterbergSep 30, 202010 min read

The Point

The Dictatorship of the Present | The Point Magazine

Thirty years ago socialism was dead and buried. This was not an illusion or a temporary hiccup, a point all the more important to emphasize […]

John Michael ColónMay 22, 201977 min read

The Point

Guilt Lit | The Point Magazine

This is the second column in the third round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond to […]

Rafael WalkerSep 17, 20209 min read

The Point

Not Even Past | The Point Magazine

As foreign observers from Tocqueville onward have noted, Americans like to think of themselves as forward-looking and self-reliant. But in the South, where history is cluttered by shameful episodes like slavery, Jim Crow, Reconstruction and inglorious defeat in war, to focus on the future can become almost a psychological necessity.

Brickey LeQuireJan 15, 201230 min read

The Point

Home Movies: On Having It All

In 2020, it is practically impossible to think of myself wanting to describe an indie movie, a TV show, a new face cream, a hit novel, an organic menstrual cup or an all-female working space as being “empowering.”

Philippa SnowSep 11, 20209 min read

The Point

Unexceptional Goals | The Point Magazine

For those of us growing up at the tail end of the twentieth century in the United States, football was something performed by Joe Montana, Bruce Smith, John Elway and Walter Payton.

Robert L. Kehoe IIIJun 28, 201811 min read

The Point

Federer as Crisis of Faith? | The Point Magazine

Growing up I was good enough at sports to be caricatured as a standard jock, with little to offer the world but a form of […]

Robert L. Kehoe IIISep 17, 201512 min read

The Point

The Simmons Affair | The Point Magazine

ESPN is big. For children of the baby boomers, it’s so big we can hardly imagine life without it. In the same way Apple, Google, […]

Robert L. Kehoe IIIOct 15, 201413 min read

The Point

Descent | The Point Magazine

No stranger to the lure of profits or excessive extremes, Armstrong and his myth thrived. But as the excavation of the demythologized narrative continues, it has become abundantly clear that the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong is not simply a story of one man’s moral failures.

Robert L. Kehoe IIIJun 22, 201437 min read

The Point

What We Despise | The Point Magazine

I went to college in a pristine picket-fence suburb, just west of Chicago.

Robert L. Kehoe IIIJan 19, 20176 min read

The Point

What Something Is | The Point Magazine

A responsible dialectical method can help open us up to the potential wisdom in what may at first appear “alien or unintelligible to us.”

Robert L. Kehoe IIIApr 24, 201811 min read

The Point

Hunger Games | The Point Magazine

Throughout an unlikely championship run in the 2014 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, they called themselves the “Hungry Huskies.” Leading the way for the University of […]

Robert L. Kehoe IIIMar 18, 201515 min read

The Point

Accounting for Tradition | The Point Magazine

Philip Gorski is a professor of sociology at Yale University, where he is the co-director of the Center for Comparative Research and the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center.

Philip Gorski, Robert L. Kehoe IIIDec 15, 201718 min read

The Point

When the Ship Has Sailed | The Point Magazine

Years ago, Alan Jacobs was a professor of mine at Wheaton College, teaching everything from the Iliad and Paradise Lost to Michel Foucault and Stanley Fish.

Alan Jacobs, Robert L. Kehoe IIISep 7, 201814 min read

The Point

In Defense of Longing | The Point Magazine

This is the first column in the third round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond […]

Timothy AubryAug 25, 20208 min read

The Point

Lights Out, Beirut | The Point Magazine

The events of the past year, culminating in the massacre this month, have blunted my ability to make any sort of rational or moral meaning of what has happened.

Zeead YaghiAug 24, 202012 min read

The Point

The Problem of Force | The Point Magazine

At the heart of the issues of both police violence and our forever wars is a moral framework which seems perpetually to link “justice” with death.

Scott BeauchampAug 7, 202014 min read