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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#251987

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Articles

Almodóvar’s Women

1 month ago | 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?

1 month ago | 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

2 months ago | 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

2 months ago | 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

2 months ago | 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

2 months ago | 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

2 months ago | 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.
Technical Sacrality

Jan 15, 2025 | thepointmag.com | Barry Schwabsky

One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he was most religiously devoted to might have been the idea of being of his time. His writing—whether in the form of poetry, fiction or polemic, among which he passionately blurred the distinctions—staked a great deal on immediacy.
Only Disconnect | The Point Magazine

Dec 12, 2024 | thepointmag.com | Kaya Genç

Oğuz Atay was my first literary idol. The Turkish writer had been dead for 21 years when I discovered his debut novel, The Disconnected, in 1998. Atay’s narrator questioned the “unconscious indifference” with which Turks embraced “the colorless, odorless existences” of people around them. He described a society where even going alone to a cinema was considered a sign of degeneracy.