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 |
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Search ArticlesIssue 37 | The Point Magazine
The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 37. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe now.
Taking a 7-1 | The Point Magazine
Taking a 7-1 | | When I first moved to Brazil, I was overwhelmed by its vastness and diversity. Brazil is physically larger than the 48 states, and includes German-speaking communities in the south, uncontacted indigenous peoples in the Amazon, the largest Japanese population outside of Japan and the largest African-descended population outside of Africa.
The Stretch of a Soul
The last thing we should want to do with accounts of mystical or transcendent or contemplative experiences is send them to the taxidermist and mount them for inspection. First we should watch them fly and roam, try to see what they see, and see what’s interesting about them. We may need different binoculars than we’re used to. That’s what explorers of those perspectives tell us, anyway.
Drain the Slop | The Point Magazine
Drain the Slop | | It’s 8:15 p.m. on Friday, June 12th, and we’re at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, a few hundred of us, for the UFC Freedom 250 press conference, the curtain raiser for the president’s birthday weekend, whose culminating fight the mini jumbotrons on either side of us tease as “The Most Historic Sporting Event of All Time.” The crowd is pretty well mixed—mostly groups of young guys along with the families and couples, but the races and ages are all covered.
Searching for the Unexpected
Carlo Ginzburg passed away on June 17th, at the age of 87. In the United States, Ginzburg is perhaps best known for his second book, The Cheese and the Worms (1976), an investigation into the idiosyncratic cosmology of a Friulian miller called Menocchio, whose name soon became a metonym for microhistory. The prefix here alludes to the art of intensive magnification.
Wiseman’s Children
The first Frederick Wiseman film I saw, and the one that remains my favorite so far (Wiseman made a lot of films, and I have yet to see more than a fraction of them), was his seventh: Juvenile Court, first shown in 1973. Like many of Wiseman’s works, it’s about an institution, the people whom that institution is made of and whom it makes.
Panahi’s Laboratory
In Taxi (2015), Jafar Panahi stages a brief but haunting moment that, in retrospect, feels like the seed of his most recent film, It Was Just an Accident (2025). Near the end of Taxi, Panahi, playing the taxi driver, becomes visibly unsettled after picking up his friend Nasrin Sotoudeh, the prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and activist. When she asks what is wrong, he replies that he has just heard a voice he thought he recognized: the voice of his interrogator.
A Part of It | The Point Magazine
A Part of It | | After my parents divorced, my dad started his own advertising agency in Manhattan and determined that his efforts to woo clients would be immeasurably enhanced by having Knicks season tickets at his disposal. But since he only had so many clients to woo and was also eager to demonstrate just how little he was taking me for granted post-divorce, he ended up bringing me to lots of games in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Critic’s Loves
Harold Bloom wrote and edited so many books that it’s hard to imagine how he found the time between them to write letters. Yet write letters he did, and just as whatever he read, he read seriously, whatever he wrote he wrote seriously. That’s something I can attest from personal experience: as a former student of his at Yale, a grad school dropout, I ventured to send him a copy of my first book of poems when it was published in 2003.
Superhuman Fantasies
In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen released a document called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which he proclaimed himself a de facto spokesman of the “effective accelerationist” movement. E/acc, as it is known in online spheres, is billed as a rejoinder to effective altruism and has gained traction in recent years among Silicon Valley technologists and the new right.