The Point
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The Point is a twice-yearly literary magazine established in Autumn 2008 by editors Jon Baskin, Jonny Thakkar, and Etay Zwick, then doctoral students at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. The magazine, based in Chicago, publishes essays in literature, culture, critical theory, politics, and the arts, as well as original art; its contributors are principally academics, although it is not a academic journal. The Point was founded as a forum in which ideas of philosophical significance could be discussed “as active forces in our lives and cultures.” It was intended as a remedy to what its editors perceived as shortcomings in the intellectual climate, particularly to the deficit of “seriousness” in the content of popular magazines for an educated audience such as The Atlantic. Source
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| Scope | International, Trade/B2B |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | United States of America |
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| Frequency | Biyearly |
Recent Articles
Search ArticlesNo Country for Tech Bros
A tropical rain had landed in Singapore, breaking the swelter of October’s first days. It was a period of anticipation and planning that, for me, had involved shipping off a packet of disarming-sounding emails and text messages to my sources, attempting to gain access to Balaji Srinivasan’s corporate home base. Srinivasan is the author of The Network State, a manifesto explaining how tech titans can start new countries; now he’s the presiding chief of a movement to make that vision a reality.
How Should a Person Die?
How Should a Person Die? | | I’m waiting for Ben to die, and I’m getting a little annoyed with how long he’s taking. Last December he announced a diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer, which meant tumors had metastasized to his lungs, his liver and his vascular and lymphatic systems. The cancer was inoperable and the verdict terminal—his doctors ballparked three to four months left to live. I saw him in April, near the end of the timeline. He certainly looked like he was dying.
How Should a Person Die?
How Should a Person Die? | | I’m waiting for Ben to die, and I’m getting a little annoyed with how long he’s taking. Last December he announced a diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer, which meant tumors had metastasized to his lungs, his liver and his vascular and lymphatic systems. The cancer was inoperable and the verdict terminal—his doctors ballparked three to four months left to live. I saw him in April, near the end of the timeline. He certainly looked like he was dying.
My Lavender Marriage
Between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s, newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times occasionally ran stories about gay men who were married to women. These often had a somewhat lurid air—Could your husband be secretly gay? Might he give you AIDS?—along with a humanitarian curiosity about the fact that it was still rather common for closeted gay men to marry women.
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.
We Were the 99 Percent
Roughly once a week, in August and early September of 2011, I sat in a semicircle in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park with eighty to a hundred others to debate how, when and why to “occupy” the financial capital of the world. As a relative newcomer to political activism, I barely said a word in those assemblies.
Goodbye, West Orange
On November 13, 2024, about fifty people gathered on a corner in West Orange, New Jersey, a quiet suburb an hour’s drive from Manhattan. The plan was to march down the block to protest in front of Moshe Glick’s home. In his fifties, graying at the temples and bald on top, Moshe is an active member of the Jewish community in West Orange, where he lives with his wife and children. He has created and supported charities that help neighbors struggling with financial difficulties or food insecurity.
The Fifth Syllable
Q. Great—I’d love to help. Do you have a particular story in mind? Q. Fascinating premise—there’s a long tradition of stories about artificial intelligence becoming conscious, but one focused on a language model like myself opens up rich questions about the specific relationship between consciousness and language. Q. Terrific—I’ll begin and tell it as a love story: Once there was a senior engineer named Nathan who worked at a cutting-edge AI research lab.
After the Post-Avant-Garde
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 Carpenter, consisted of ten large, blank canvases and a box of paints in the center. During the opening, the crowd took up the paints and made childish paintings of stupid, ironic jokes: a scrawled “BANKS ARE COOL,” dollar signs, a vomiting head, an alien head, a crude rainbow, text written by one person and crossed out by another, etc.
Student of Desire
Years ago, I had an intense relationship with a man who was brilliant and deeply interesting to talk to. I didn’t doubt he felt similarly toward me. But we had other problems, and we were constantly breaking up and getting back together until at last we ended things for good. One night, not long after the final rupture, we agreed to meet at a bar in the East Village with a few friends. He brought the woman he had begun seeing. I was curious what she would be like.