The Point Magazine

Where Does Politics Take Place? | The Point Magazine The starkest, most disquieting scene from the film was printed on postcards and handed out at the door. We picked up our postcards as we […]

New online, a web supplement to our issue 36 forum on the left and the good life: Ege Yumuşak on making space for political engagement in everyday life.

2026 Summer Workshop Application Apply for the Public Thinking Summer Workshop at the University of Chicago.

Apply here: publicthinking.typeform.com/workshop26app

We're hosting two workshops this year at UChicago: "Questions Concerning Technology," taught by Jon Baskin and Dan Silver, and "The Good Life," taught by Anastasia Berg and Joseph Keegin. More info: publicthinking.thepointmag.com/workshop#themes

Summer Workshop — Public Thinking

Applications are open for our fully funded Summer Workshops on the philosophy and practice of public thinking—an incredible opportunity for college students interested in writing and engaging the public. Learn More: www.publicthinking.thepointmag.com/workshop

Freedom of Intelligence | The Point Magazine In the name of progress, public education is now pressed into the service of agendas that align with corporate profit, workforce readiness, ideological reproduction and demand for quantifiable results...

I wrote about Plato, Huxley, Dewey, and why we should
teach books in schools, for the left— thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Larger than Life | The Point Magazine At the screening of Marty Supreme that I went to before Christmas, Timothée Chalamet said that his performance was in part inspired by The Last […]

"We can excuse someone being an asshole if they go on to do great things, if they do the things we can’t. There’s much less to sympathize with in the asshole who ends up choosing the small life like the rest of us." @zeets.bsky.social on "Marty Supreme". thepointmag.com/forms-of-lif...

Listless Liberalism | The Point Magazine Where is liberalism’s “Fascinating Fascism”? Who is its Riefenstahl?

Really good piece on the stylelessness of liberals:

'There is no liberal Joe Rogan because his liberal equivalent would rather soliloquize and tweak a couple of ordinances than enter into an unscripted tête-à-tête for hours.' thepointmag.com/criticism/li...

Larger than Life | The Point Magazine At the screening of Marty Supreme that I went to before Christmas, Timothée Chalamet said that his performance was in part inspired by The Last […]

I wrote about Marty Supreme and the problem with writing a compelling unlikable protagonist and then undercutting him at the end in the name of sentimentality thepointmag.com/forms-of-lif...

Larger than Life | The Point Magazine At the screening of Marty Supreme that I went to before Christmas, Timothée Chalamet said that his performance was in part inspired by The Last […]

New on Forms of Life, @zeets.bsky.social on sports movies, “Marty Supreme,” and the trouble with its ending:

On the Liberal Imagination | The Point Magazine There are understandable reasons why liberal and leftist intellectuals are cautious about discussing the good life.

“Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind,” wrote the liberal critic Lionel Trilling, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like.””
thepointmag.com/politics/on-...

Soft Power in Hard Times | The Point Magazine Marx famously wrote that men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please—a line that has often crossed my mind […]

New online, Alex Gendler on Voice of America’s downfall and the end of soft power:

Orson Welles sets up a scene in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942).

An AI-driven reconstruction of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS @newyorker.com, Wes Anderson @thepointmag.bsky.social, Michael Almereyda @nytimes.com + @hammertonail.bsky.social + @screenslate.bsky.social, @szacharek.bsky.social on the underappreciated …

Did You See This? www.criterion.com/current/post...

super thoughtful, well laid out essay about reading literature in schools and progressive ed

loved this part about a character in Brave New World reading Shakespeare on his own, and how, lacking a broader context where others have also read and discussed Shakespeare, the books don’t save him

Freedom of Intelligence | The Point Magazine In the name of progress, public education is now pressed into the service of agendas that align with corporate profit, workforce readiness, ideological reproduction and demand for quantifiable results...

Ah that feeling when you read something that says everything you're currently trying to write, but better. Love this piece on progressive education by @annieabrams.bsky.social: thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Listless Liberalism | The Point Magazine Where is liberalism’s “Fascinating Fascism”? Who is its Riefenstahl?

"Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity." || via @thepointmag.bsky.social

Listless Liberalism | The Point Magazine Where is liberalism’s “Fascinating Fascism”? Who is its Riefenstahl?

From the new issue, Becca Rothfeld on two recent books that “typify the liberal tendency to fiddle while Rome goes up in flames”: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” and Cass Sunstein’s “On Liberalism”:

Radical Eudaimonism | The Point Magazine The choice is not between growth and degrowth but capital growth and rational growth.

great article by Jensen Suther on the faults of degrowth Marxism thepointmag.com/politics/rad...

Tragic Heritage | The Point Magazine The questions surrounding this small museum can be extended to the country at large: What value does Soviet heritage have in Ukraine now?

With Russia's full-scale invasion, contextualizing Ukraine’s Soviet past became more complicated than ever. An essay I wrote for @thepointmag.bsky.social looks at what its meant for the museum holding Ukraine's largest collection of Soviet socialist realist art. thepointmag.com/corresponden...

"When I try to remember what it was like to be that age, what I remember is a burning desire to be somebody else. I don’t just mean that I didn’t want to be me, but that I also actively wanted to be other people, who happened to be near me at the time. If I felt defined by anything, it was the absence of those instinctive ceremonies of self that the people around me were conducing quite unthinkingly. And if I didn’t have an instinct for scandal or Olympian hauteur or social grace or a gift for euphoric absurdity or a straightforward way of loving those around me or emotional percipience or a really cool skill, and was besides a 0.01st-percentile dancer with a wrong sort of face and walk, at least I could roll a cigarette quicker and better than anyone else and I always had something to do with my hands."

wonderful piece on the life of a smoker — and the process of quitting — by @johnphipps.bsky.social thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

“Education is for the student’s benefit, not for the benefit of their future employer…students go to school not merely to acquire skills but to develop an entire social and intellectual life: to have something good and to have it forever”
@thepointmag.bsky.social

thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Enjoying Becca Rothfeld's skewering of "Abundance" and Cass Sunstein's latest

thepointmag.com/criticism/li...

I really love that Annie’s work doesn’t simply defend the liberal arts, it actively demonstrates how taking up its texts & traditions can provide invaluable insight into contemporary issues. English classes should be invitations to appreciate, enjoy, & contribute to living traditions & communities.

The Great Replacement | The Point Magazine None of us—Camus, the peddlers of multicultural ephemera, the internet Nazis or me—is immune to the self-forgetting that follows the transformation of genuine cultural memory into kitsch.

A poignant, poetic take on the waning Canadian migrant dream, and the very hot, present, (im)migrant pivot across the globe. Vikrant Dadawala is clear-eyed and nuanced about his grasp of the situation and where he himself stands in it:

thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Freedom of Intelligence | The Point Magazine In the name of progress, public education is now pressed into the service of agendas that align with corporate profit, workforce readiness, ideological reproduction and demand for quantifiable results...

"Teachers can show students what has moved others to use language with care...and invite them to join a long tradition of people who have found a way to say something new." - @annieabrams.bsky.social, in a crucial essay on the struggle for liberal education.

thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Right and Left | The Point Magazine Another fed worker tells me he spends his days pacing the marble corridors of his office like an absolute madman. The Lana del Rey lyric “I don’t wanna do this anymore” plays on loops in his head in L...

"Forms of labor that conserve, fix, make and care for others once had a place in the mythos of America, not to mention on the mantle of the Old Left."

Extraordinary essay about what the last year has been like in DC by Noelle Bodick in @thepointmag.bsky.social

thepointmag.com/politics/rig...

“calling our current public-education policy ‘progressive’ is, read most generously, imprecise”

great essay about what progressive education ought to aim for—one that hopefully clarifies things not only for the Tates of the world, but also for those of us who aim to do this kind of work ourselves.

The Left Case for Great Books | The Point Magazine A great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually ...

For @thepointmag.bsky.social I wrote one of the most personally important essays I’ve ever written. Please give it a read if you’re someone who cares about education. thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Issue 36—featuring a forum on the left and the good life and essays on D.C. after DOGE, Wes Anderson, Soviet Ukrainian art under threat, and much more—is now online! Read it here:
thepointmag.com/issue/issue-36/