The Point

The Point is a literary magazine that comes out twice a year and was founded in Fall 2008 by Jon Baskin, Jonny Thakkar, and Etay Zwick, who were doctoral students at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. Based in Chicago, the magazine features essays on topics like literature, culture, critical theory, politics, and the arts, along with original artwork. While most contributors are academics, it is not classified as an academic journal. The Point was created to provide a space for discussing ideas that hold philosophical importance as they influence our lives and culture. Its founders aimed to address what they saw as a lack of depth and seriousness in the content of popular publications aimed at educated readers, such as The Atlantic.

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English

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Turbo America | The Point Magazine

2 weeks ago | thepointmag.com | Sam Venis

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. Packs of bureaucrats who worked in the building stood together with clipboards and whispered among themselves. It was unclear exactly what was being protested.
Crushing Banalities

3 weeks ago | thepointmag.com | Sophie Kemp

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 light outside is always muted, gray with little pockets of soft blue. He is constantly renting Teslas, and driving them down the A66. He plays Discover Weekly Spotify playlists via Bluetooth technology. He was born in 1982 and designs websites, which he considers an art form. He lives outside of Frankfurt, in Maintal, where he grew up.
Almodóvar’s Women

Mar 11, 2025 | thepointmag.com | Alana Pockros

If you are a leading woman in a Pedro Almodóvar film, your life will not be frictionless. You will have a terminal illness. Or if you don’t have one, you will be grieving the one that someone very close to you has. You will be a single mother or mother-to-be. You will have very intimate female friendships, but you won’t always be faithful, or act selflessly. You will work a creative career, such as writing or acting or photographing products for advertisements.
Is There a Mainstream Media?

Mar 5, 2025 | thepointmag.com | James Bennet

This is the text of a talk delivered by James Bennet at the University of Chicago on February 26th, followed by a Q&A with Point editor Jon Baskin. The event was part of the Public Thinking Lecture Series, co-organized by the Point Program for Public Thinking and the Parrhesia Program for Public Thought and Discourse. A recording of the lecture can be viewed here. Want to keep up with the Public Thinking initiative and its future events? Sign up for the Public Thinking newsletter.
Issue 34 Archives | The Point Magazine

Feb 4, 2025 | thepointmag.com | Becca Rothfeld |Jessi Jezewska Stevens |Grazie Sophia Christie |Rafael Frumkin

By Jessi Jezewska Stevens How should the left counter right-wing irony, if not by adopting the same destructive rhetorical strategies as Trump, or else slipping back into its own contemptuous habits?
Among the Post-Feminists

Feb 4, 2025 | thepointmag.com | Grazie Sophia Christie

I was scammed once, during the single, broiling summer I ever lived in New York City. In urgent need of an apartment, I exchanged messages with a friend of a friend; soon I found myself exchanging money, although I suppose exchange is the wrong word. I got nothing in return for my timely wire: no keys, no half of a decent two-bedroom, no reply to my furious question marks. It was a great deal of money for me and I felt too ashamed to go to the police and more ashamed than that to go to my father.
Alt Lit | The Point Magazine

Feb 4, 2025 | thepointmag.com | Sam Kriss

Here’s a fun game we can play. I’m going to give you some quotes from a few recently published novels. Some of them are vaguely associated with an infamous downtown scene in New York. In this scene everyone’s either young or cool or beautiful, and they’re all skinny and smoke cigarettes, and they laugh at all the fussy pieties of the world, and they’re all constantly online while also constantly going to parties.
On the Old Romantics

Feb 4, 2025 | thepointmag.com | Becca Rothfeld

No sooner had Donald Trump secured the presidency for a second time than the commentators began commentating and the prophets began prophesying. Trump would criminalize microplastics; he would build the long-awaited wall; he would Make America Great Again, again, maybe this time for good. Meanwhile, an elite coterie insisted that he would do something that he had never mentioned, even in his most meandering speeches: he would revitalize Culture. How was he going to do this?
Trickle-Down Culture

Feb 4, 2025 | thepointmag.com | Emily Jashinsky

During the summer of 2010, I experienced the inexplicable rampage of Silly Bandz in real time. At a ten-day camp in Washington, D.C. filled mostly with teenagers from the East Coast, everyone seemed to be wearing the same rubber bracelets. They were neon and flimsy and only revealed their true shape when taken off, sometimes a letter, sometimes an animal, always useless. By the time fall rolled around in Wisconsin, Silly Bandz had arrived thirty miles west of Milwaukee.
Los Angeles Burns

Jan 16, 2025 | thepointmag.com | Barrett Avner

Los Angeles Burns | | One of the first books I ever read was City of Quartz by Mike Davis. Growing up in LA, reading it felt serendipitous—I didn’t read much and had very little interest in structural criticism. Before that the only books I had finished were Louis L’Amour paperback westerns with my grandpa and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver—yet it found its way to me somehow in a manner I can neither recall nor remember.