Mano a Mano | The Point Magazine
Aristotle, a student of a wrestler named Plato, taught that eudaimonia, usually translated as “happiness” or “the good life,” requires both intellectual and moral virtues. […]| The Point Magazine
Politics | The Point Magazine
I was once told that I was in an abusive relationship with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team. It is true that they have […] The post Begin the World Over Again appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
Aristotle, a student of a wrestler named Plato, taught that eudaimonia, usually translated as “happiness” or “the good life,” requires both intellectual and moral virtues. […]| The Point Magazine
Photography, wrote Susan Sontag, is “the gentlest of predations.” But is photography necessarily a violation? What is actually involved in the work of documenting violence? To answer these questions, we surveyed photojournalists and conflict photographers from around the world this past spring.| The Point Magazine
Politics | The Point Magazine
On the 30th of March, 1981, John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. The post American Idols appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
Basically, because I’m so interested in what’s popular, this essay has to be about what normal porn actually is, rather than about the goings-on of some esoteric and richly suggestive kink community about which we would love some novel and detailed news. The post The Front Page appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
While “everyone” may understand the pragmatic or raw emotive reasons for violence, I’m not sure anyone understands sadistic violence sans motive, especially when acted out on helpless victims or in the context of social normalcy. Or maybe we do understand. The post Demonic Force appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
On any given day for the past quarter of a century, the United States was probably dropping bombs on a country somewhere. The post The War Habit appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
Christian pacifism irritates because it demands what the biblical scholar Richard Hays calls “the conversion of the imagination”—the overturning of certain assumptions that modernity lives by. The post Militants for Peace appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
Violence had not just wrought metaphorical transformations in Syrians, turning them at points into bystanders, accomplices, exiles, perpetrators, victims and (for now) a free people. It had also turned their bodies and even their unborn children into repositories of what had happened. The post What We Become appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
As soon as the owner of an old wardrobe/television/bicycle pushes it off the ramp, as soon as it’s “in there,” as they say at the Berlin Sanitation Department’s waste disposal sites, it no longer belongs to him; instead, it becomes the property of the department. The post Permanent Impermanence appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
Tonight, across this country and on bases far afield, young American soldiers will take shifts guarding explosives. The post Fear and Trembling in the Garrison appeared first on The Point Magazine.| The Point Magazine
I’m still breathing, I’ll tell her, and so are those around me.| The Point Magazine
My wife would probably be surprised to hear me say this, but I know that soccer doesn’t matter. Her surprise, I suspect, would be due […]| The Point Magazine
The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 35.| The Point Magazine
Last month, Point editor Becca Rothfeld and cultural critic Sam Kahn used their respective Substacks to debate… the merits of Substack. The following conversation picks […]| The Point Magazine
Last month, Point editor Becca Rothfeld and cultural critic Sam Kahn used their respective Substacks to debate… the merits of Substack. The following conversation picks […]| The Point Magazine
Listen to an audio version of this essay: Curio · The Point | The Universe and the University Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist, is a […]| The Point Magazine
When I was fourteen, my family went on a Caribbean cruise. I have always been allergic to the idea of going somewhere for the explicit […]| The Point Magazine
This is the second column in a four-part series by B.D. McClay on speculative fiction.| The Point Magazine
It was a crisp March morning in Austin, and just outside the Texas Capitol a swarm of protesters large enough to fill a sports arena had gathered to wave signs and shout into megaphones.| The Point Magazine
In the fall of 2023 my first television show entered that bone-chilling process known as development.| The Point Magazine
What if Airless Spaces, and the life of its author, cannot be read as a story at all?| The Point Magazine
2018, Germany. A bungalow, with anthracite walls and a flat roof. Jerome Daimler’s parents purchased it. They’re divorced now. He lives there alone.| The Point Magazine
Over the course of the past two years, university committees focused on the impact of artificial intelligence have assembled across the country.| The Point Magazine
In the lead-up to the 2008 election, Nate Silver revolutionized the way we talk about politics, bringing cold, hard, numerical facts to a world that had been dominated by the gut feelings of reporters and opinion columnists.| The Point Magazine
Winter 2025 | The Point Magazine
This is the first column in a four-part series by B.D. McClay on speculative fiction.| The Point Magazine
Politics | The Point Magazine
I expected to find something of a political sideshow at NatCon; instead, I found a movement, perhaps the only one I’d encountered during my time in D.C.| The Point Magazine
We didn’t know her. What an opportunity. She could have said, been, anything.| The Point Magazine
Even when sincerely believed, the “truths” of the post-feminists are alternative; their motives mixed, if not downright ulterior.| The Point Magazine
The thing that actually matters about a scene is the work it produces. So I decided to read the work.| The Point Magazine
Politics | The Point Magazine
As 2024 comes to a close, we’re proud to present our most-read essays of the year, listed below in reverse order.| The Point Magazine
If the intellectual at the think tank was the assistant to the legislator, here she has become the willing tool of the activist.| The Point Magazine
When I saw the party announcement weeks ago I felt a sinking feeling and simply avoided it. At 10 p.m. on election night, after it had become clear which way things were going, I decided to go.| The Point Magazine
Protest exposes a tension between the university’s intellectual mission and its political ambitions.| The Point Magazine
In Marilynne Robinson’s latest book, Reading Genesis, she carries the theology implicit in her fiction back to its scriptural source.| The Point Magazine
I have nothing approaching an answer to your question. I’ve chosen it because it expresses what I consider the foremost problem in my own life.| The Point Magazine
One of the paradoxes of advice seems to be that those most likely to be asked for it are least likely to have taken anyone else’s: their projects of “becoming” are the most particularized of all.| The Point Magazine
This is the fifth installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love.| The Point Magazine
Since 1999, Edwin Frank and a handful of colleagues have published more than five hundred titles noteworthy for their excellence, latitude and cosmopolitanism.| The Point Magazine
In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all.| The Point Magazine
This is the fourth installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love.| The Point Magazine
This is the third installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love.| The Point Magazine
Before the 1970s, the word “parent” was commonly used only as a noun; since that time, American parents have roughly doubled the amount of time they spend parenting, and each generation since seems to stress more about parenting than the previous one.| The Point Magazine
I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk.| The Point Magazine
There is a minor grievance I have been nursing for some time now, against a friend who uninvited me from a party he threw.| The Point Magazine
Is there any way to intervene usefully or meaningfully in public debate—in what extremely online Twitter users call, with gleeful irony, the “discourse”?| The Point Magazine
This is the first column in a four-part series by Nicholas Whittaker on black horror. New installments will be published monthly. Black art—or, art about […]| The Point Magazine
If you wanted to know what was really going on, you had to get on Urbit.| The Point Magazine
For now, The Network State is an exemplary salvo in a debate playing out in tech today over which type of world we want to live in: A world of Atoms, or of Bits?| The Point Magazine
If hyperpolitics offers some tentative clues for analyzing the post-2008 epoch in the West, the concept can only be fully grasped as part of a broader chronology of the political forms—from mass politics to post-politics—that ran across the twentieth and 21st centuries.| The Point Magazine
