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Articles by Jon Baskin
After Analysis: Authenticity, Autofiction, and the End of Art
This post is a lightly edited version of a talk I originally delivered at the University of Chicago, in 2016, to complete the requirements for my dissertation about David Foster Wallace, later adapted into an essay for the collection David Foster Wallace in Context (Cambridge, 2022).
On Radical Preservation
Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. —Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 1946 In his 2006 book Radical Hope, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes about what it is like to live through a period of profound cultural upheaval. His subject is the last chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups.
On Preservation | The Point Magazine
Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. —Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 1946 In his 2006 book Radical Hope, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes about what it is like to live through a period of profound cultural upheaval. His subject is the last chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups.
How We All Became Bernhard Bros
This post is most profitably read as an addendum to Naomi Kanakia’s impressively comprehensive report on the influence of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard on contemporary fiction. Although I have not read all of Bernhard’s books or all of the novels of his most prominent inheritors—as Kanakia did—I’ve long been interested in why Bernhard’s style seems so particularly appealing to contemporary Anglophone writers and readers. I include “readers” here as a reference first of all to myself.
Issue 36 Archives | The Point Magazine
Winter 2026 The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what's in Issue 36. By By By By By By By By By By By By By By and By By By By
On the Liberal Imagination
ROSS DOUTHAT: It is impossible for me—as a religious person, I’m sorry—not to look at progressivism right now and say, “You need something else on the horizon besides saying we’re all going to be inclusive, and we’re going to get rich together with flying cars.” You need to say, “So that we can live in some specific way that we are supposed to live.” What is that way, Ezra Klein? How then shall we live? EZRA KLEIN: My friend, I am a liberal.
Knausgaard, Wallace, Dostoevsky
For a few days on the week it was published I was so distracted by the gooners essay, and then the various reactions to the gooners essay on social media (which have now become an expected part of the experience of cultural consumption, like the postgame shows for sporting events), that I failed to notice Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “second read” column in the New Yorker, on The Brothers Karamazov.
Is Humanistic Knowledge Useless?
Our series of reflections on the place of the humanities in graduate education continues with this exchange between Point founding editor Jon Baskin and Michael Lipkin, the academic director of the Program for Public Thinking. Following on Ben Jeffery and Becca Rothfeld’s earlier exchange, Jon and Mike ask: What does it mean to say humanistic scholars “produce knowledge” in the first place? And is it important to ask what this knowledge is “for”?
What's the Point?
My guest on the show today is , co-founder and editor of magazine, which over the last 16 years has managed to carve out for itself a really distinctive and important space within the broader American literary intellectual scene. Jon and I have traded emails over the years, but like a lot of people who I think of as loose comrades within the broader scene, we had never actually gazed on each other’s faces or heard each other’s voices before we got on Zoom to do this. So it was nice to connect.
Jon Baskin and David Sessions on the Millennial Left
This dialogue took place over the past six weeks in response to a series of Substack posts looking back at left intellectual life in the late 2010s. It has been divided into three separate posts for the sake of readability. The first is below. Click for the second installment, on the millennial left’s response to wokeness, and the third, on the left-intellectual project in America.
The Sincerity Files
“The task of the modern man is… to find something he can be sincere and serious in; something he can mean. And he may not at all.” —Stanley Cavell As I’ve been clicking around Substack in recent months—a new experience for me, starting a little before we officially created one for the magazine—I’ve noticed that much of the writing shares a quality that I’ll call, for now, “sincerity.” I know that much else besides this kind of writing is published here.
What is Substack for?
When we started The Point back in 2009, we hoped the magazine would not only be a place where readers would encounter writing that could help them address basic questions in their lives, but also that it would inspire, in the broader culture, a more serious and thoughtful public conversation. On this last point, I at least was often to be disappointed.
Issue 37 Archives | The Point Magazine
By Laura Baudot My daughter joined her school’s newly formed girls’ wrestling team in the seventh grade. Her first tournament was at a high school in Oak Harbor, […] By Sean Tatol The last pre-covid exhibition at the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in downtown New York was titled Paint-It-Yourself. The exhibit, showing new work by Merlin […] By Adelle Waldman Years ago, I had an intense relationship with a man who was brilliant and deeply interesting to talk to.
On Students | The Point Magazine
As the campus protests against the war in Gaza spread across the country this past spring, affecting hundreds of colleges and resulting in the arrest of some three thousand protesters, academics and intellectuals responded according to a familiar pattern. Mainstream liberal and conservative commentators tended to counsel ignoring the protesters.
Issue 33 Archives | The Point Magazine
Fall 2024 The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what's in Issue 33. By By By By By By By By By By By By
Biggest Losers | The Point Magazine
Biggest Losers | | Having deferred their destiny with an improbable three-game winning streak, the 2024 Chicago White Sox succumbed to the inevitable last night, falling 4-1 to the Detroit Tigers and becoming, officially, the worst team in modern baseball history. With their 121st loss, they have broken the record held by the 1962 New York Mets, of 120 losses. The 1962 Mets, though, had a good excuse for losing 120 games—they were an expansion team.
Israel Stories | The Point Magazine
Matti Friedman is a freelance journalist and the author of Pumpkinflowers and Who by Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen. Based in Israel, Friedman joined the Jerusalem bureau for the AP in 2006. After leaving the AP in 2011, Friedman has continued to report from the region, and his essays for publications such as the Atlantic, Tablet, and the Smithsonian have often focused on the distorting role of what he calls the “Israel story” in the Western press and imagination.
Issue 32 Archives | The Point Magazine
Spring 2024 The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what's in Issue 32. By By By By By By By By By By By By By By
On the Crisis of Men
On a Saturday morning this winter, while my wife trained for a half-marathon, I was tasked with taking our eighteen-month-old daughter to the neighborhood synagogue for “Shabbat for Tots.” Shabbat for Tots was exactly what it sounds like: about two dozen children between one and four years old gathered in a preschool classroom with their parents while a woman in her twenties played guitar and sang songs very loudly.
On David Foster Wallace
“The reason it’s so hard to write a cruise piece is because of David Foster Wallace,” explains Lauren Oyler, a critic and the author of the novel Fake Accounts. In her recent Harper’s Magazine cover story, she takes on Wallace’s 1997 cruise essay, also published in Harper’s, as she describes her experience aboard the Goop cruise. “But I didn’t want it to just be a work of criticism reckoning with David Foster Wallace’s reputation,” Oyler adds.
Progress Studies
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the director of the Mercatus Center, a free-market research center and think tank. He is also the co-founder of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, and the host of the podcast series Conversations with Tyler.
The Best Scholarly Books of 2022
Last year, our annual Best Scholarly Books forum didn’t come out until early January — too late to have much impact on your holiday gift-buying, unless you’re chronically tardy in such matters. Fear not: with uncharacteristic dispatch, this year we’ve worked late into the night to bring you 12 must-read titles just in time for Christmas, provided you do your shopping at the last possible minute. And there are still a few days left of Hanukkah, too.
David Foster Wallace’s Final Attempt to Make Art Moral
Before David Foster Wallace died by suicide at his California home, in 2008, he left a pile of papers, spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, and floppy disks on a table in his garage. The collection of notes, outlines, prose fragments, character sketches, and partial chapters reportedly ran to hundreds of thousands of words, most of them circling a group of accountants at an office for the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985.
David Foster Wallace’s Final Attempt to Make Art Moral Original
As usual, Wallace’s choice of words was not casual. The ability to see what’s useful and what isn’t wasn’t just what Wallace believed that he needed to complete his final novel; it was also the virtue of mind he hoped it would cultivate in his readers. The most common rhetorical mode of “The Pale King” is commotion recollected in tranquillity. “I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.
What a Coup Is: A conversation with Edward Luttwak
Edward Luttwak is a military historian, defense consultant and geopolitical grand strategist who has advised world leaders on security and strategy. The author of more than a dozen books, he has published on modern warfare, the winners and losers of “turbo-capitalism,” the strategy of the Byzantine Empire and, most recently, the rise of China. Luttwak first rose to public prominence with Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, written in 1968 while he was working as an oil consultant in London.
What is the earth for?
Toward a Useful Ignorance I remember shutting my eyes to hear the soft wind sigh in the fine fringe of wire-thin needles, gathered five to a bunch, soughing high…
Issue 26 Archives | The Point Magazine
Winter 22 The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what's in Issue 26. Buy Now On Language Games By Jon Baskin For a country so often believed to be anti-intellectual, it is striking how much of American political conversation has come to revolve around seemingly pedantic […] Hysterical Empathy By Shaan Sachdev With a clenched jaw, I watched the Rohingya girl on my computer screen describe her getaway. “What happened?” asked the man filming her shakily.
On Language Games
For a country so often believed to be anti-intellectual, it is striking how much of American political conversation has come to revolve around seemingly pedantic quarrels about terminology.
Above the Veil | The Point Magazine
When Howard University announced it would be shuttering its classics department this past April, it reignited a longstanding debate about the role of classical texts in Black education. Anika T.
Issue 25 Archives | The Point Magazine
Where Is the University? By Ege Yumusak Anna, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, plays a peculiar game to pass the time. She invented it as a child, but now, […] The Universe and the University By Jennifer A.
On College | The Point Magazine
Ever since The Point was founded twelve years ago by graduate students on a university campus in Chicago, it has faced in two directions at once. On one hand, the magazine’s aspiration to provide a public forum for writing seriously about ideas was always meant, in part, as a criticism of the customary ways humanities scholars communicated about their subject matter.
Issue 24 Archives | The Point Magazine
Spring 2021 The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what's in Issue 24. Buy Now No Good Has Come By Elisa Gonzalez Marilynne Robinson has called writing a “testimony.” For her work—six books of dense and fiery nonfiction, and five novels—“testimony” is a suitably multifarious word. It […] House Hunters By Nora Caplan-Bricker I wondered if these novels could cut through it to show me whether there is, in fact, anything suspect about the longing for a house.
On Ideal Theories
In 2009, as we were working on the first issue of this magazine, Barack Obama delivered his inauguration speech in Washington, D.C. A graduate student in Chicago at the time, I had followed the campaign closely, and the soaring vision of America he presented that day was familiar—but no less satisfying for that.
Always Already Alienated
Ben Lerner and the novel of detachment. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark Ben Lerner Although he has only published two books of fiction, Ben Lerner has already earned a reputation as a literary bellwether.
How to Reopen the American Mind
Jon Baskin & Anastasia Berg The New York Times October 26, 2020 Charles Fox/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP This fall, as college students filter hesitantly into socially distanced classrooms or adjust their Zoom backgrounds for seminars they attend from their bedrooms, the usual debates about the aims of higher education have taken a back seat to more pressing concerns. Many colleges and universities are now fighting for survival.
Opinion | Reopen the American Mind
THE STONE In the midst of an existential crisis for higher education, is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive? By Jon Baskin and Anastasia Berg Mr. Baskin and Ms. Berg are editors of The Point. Oct.
Issue 23 Archives | The Point Magazine
Fall 2020 The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what's in Issue 23. Buy Now On Integration By Jesse McCarthy and Jon Baskin This summer, amid the ongoing protests for racial justice, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility once again shot up the best-seller lists. The book, which had already […] Dismissal By Asad Haider In November 1965, the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was reviewed by Yao Wenyuan in the newspaper Wenhuibao.
On Integration | The Point Magazine
This summer, amid the ongoing protests for racial justice, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility once again shot up the best-seller lists. The book, which had already been a huge success on the diversity-training circuit and had received mixed, but muted, responses from intellectual commentators, was now subjected to a symptomatic backlash.
Coming to Terms | The Point Magazine
Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, the two most important American writers of their era, both grew up in the Midwest.
“We Are All Rachel Dolezal”: A conversation with Asad Haider
This is part II of Jesse McCarthy’s interview with Asad Haider, the author of Mistaken Identity (Verso, Spring 2018). Click here to read Part I, “The Consolations of Identity.” ● Jesse McCarthy: Setting aside the left turning on itself, I wonder if you’ve received critiques along the lines of cultural nationalism, and black-nationalist politics in particular. I keep going back to Harold Cruse and some of the arguments that he makes in “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual” (1967).
Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic
Jon Baskin New York Review of Books August 20, 2020 Triumph of the Will, the 1935 Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl in Nuremberg, comes up twice in the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel,My Struggle. Both mentions of the film occur in the midst of Knausgaard’s epic tangent on Hitler’s autobiography and the rise of National Socialism in Europe.
The Unbearable: Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic
The Unbearable: Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty ImagesDirector Leni Riefenstahl operating a camera from a lift basket while filming Triumph of the Will at the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Rally, Germany, 1934 Triumph of the Will, the 1935 Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl in Nuremberg, comes up twice in the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle.
Can Charlie Kaufman Get Out of His Head?
To render the above events even with this modest level of clarity, however, is misleading. It is never obvious if Ingo actually exists, if the film exists, if Rosenberg really stops for fast food, if there has been any fire.
Mistakes We’ve Made
George Kateb is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he joined the faculty in 1987. He is well known for his writing on individualism, political life and American democracy, notably in his books Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984), The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (1992) and Emerson and Self-Reliance (1994).
Socialism or Democracy?
For a few weeks, while I was writing the first draft of this review, the leading candidate in the Democratic presidential primary was an avowed socialist. This was unprecedented, and revealing in terms of the changing attitudes of Americans. Huge numbers of Americans now see socialism as superior to capitalism—particularly among the young and among Democrats. Regardless of the ultimate fate of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, socialism has reentered democratic politics in the United States.
Property Damage | The Point Magazine
This interview first appeared on Tocqueville21, a blog about twentieth-century democracy. ● With the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013, Thomas Piketty became perhaps the world’s best-known chronicler and theorist of global inequality.
Wanting Bad Things: Andrea Long Chu responds to Amia Srinivasan
This conversation first appeared on Rather Be Reading, The Point podcast. To listen to an edited version of their discussion (and the rest of the episode) click here. What appears below is a more complete transcript of their conversation. ● When I sat down to read Andrea Long Chu’s essay “On Liking Women” in n+1, I didn’t expect it to reflect back to me so vividly a key aspect of my own experience of being a woman: wanting to be and to have things I shouldn’t.
Hail Mary Time? | The Point Magazine
A very American revolution took place in 1906. No riots, no placards, no mob justice; this was a revolution from above, presented as a natural evolution from an old regime that had already begun to crack and crumble. For in the years since it had divorced itself from rugby and its free-flowing, zigzagging runs, American football had become little more than trench warfare—attritional, ugly, bloody.
Friends Like These
Jon Baskin The Point Magazine January 31, 2020 “What I want to make plain,” wrote Lionel Trilling in a 1947 letter to a friend, “is my deep distaste for liberal culture.” Coming from a purported liberal and the soon-to-be author ofThe Liberal Imagination, Trilling recognized such a sentiment was “difficult to explain.” He found himself to be “in accord with most of the liberal ideas of freedom, tolerance, etc.,” and yet the tone in which these ideals are uttered depress[es] me endlessly.
Issue 21 Archives | The Point Magazine
Rape Fantasies By Rachel Fraser It’s possible, then, to see rape crisis centers as useful idiots, their volunteers as cheap alibis for the carceral state. But that too-pat radicalism doesn’t account for what can happen when the phone does ring. Normal Novels By Becca Rothfeld The Irish novelist Sally Rooney is a normal person. Or so she is always insisting, often with a trace of defensive desperation. Man in the Crowd By Abhrajyoti Chakraborty Sen plunged headlong into the chaos.
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