On this bonus episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov about their new anthology of the best of n+1’s second decade, The Intellectual Situation. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here at 50% off the normal rate.By The Point Magazine

On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to George Scialabba about Michael Walzer’s "In Defense of Equality," first published in Dissent in 1973. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here at 50% off the normal rate.By The Point Magazine

On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to writer and literary critic Emily Ogden about Elizabeth Hardwick’s "Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Berenson," first published in Partisan Review in 1960. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here at 50% off the normal rate.By The Point Magazine

On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Julian Lucas about his essay “Welcome to Armageddon,” published in Cabinet in 2017, and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” which was written in 1951. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here at 50% off the normal rate.…

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Greg Jackson about his essay “Within the Pretense of No Pretense,” published in issue 31 of The Point, and Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics,” first published in 1967 in the New Yorker. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here at 50% off the normal rate.…

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Michael Clune about his essay “The Anatomy of Panic,” published in Harper's last May and recently selected for Best American Essays, and Thomas Nagel’s “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” first published in 1974 in the Philosophical Review. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and…

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Jennifer Wilson about her New York Times Book Review essay, “The Love Letters That Spoke of Everything but Love,” and Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device,” first published in 1917. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50 at checkout for 50% off.…

On this bonus episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Point editors, Jon Baskin and Rachel Wiseman about two of their favorite essays—Charles Comey's “Against Honeymoons,” and Moeko Fujii’s “Let Them Misunderstand”—and what makes them quintessential Point pieces.By The Point Magazine

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Apoorva Tadepalli about Maeve Brennan’s “Lost Overtures” and her Electric Lit essay “It’s Okay to Talk to Me When I’m Trying to Read.”By The Point Magazine

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Sumana Roy about Joseph Brodsky’s “Less Than One” and her Caravan essay “We Are All Mamata Now.” Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50 at checkout for 50% off.By The Point Magazine

On the new episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach speak with Clare Bucknell about Charles Lamb’s “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers”—surprisingly the first essay a guest has chosen that was written before 1900. In histories of the essay form, from Montaigne forward, you’ll often see Lamb’s name appear as one of the great “familiar” essayists, but h…

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Suzy Hansen about her essay, “A Cold War Mind: American and the World,” a chapter from Suzy's book Notes on a Foreign Country, and Octavio Paz’s “The Pachucho and Other Extremes,” the first part of his 1950 book The Labyrinth of Solitude. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here …

Jess and Zach go over their favorite moments from the first season of “Selected Essays”—listen in for the highlights and then catch up in time for Season 2.By The Point Magazine

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Garth Greenwell about his essay “A Moral Education: In Praise of Filth,” which was published in The Yale Review in 2023 and Martha Nussbaum’s "Flawed Crystals: James's The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy," which originally appeared in the journal New Literary History in 19…

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Lauren Oyler about her essay “Desperately Seeking Sebald,” which was published in Harper’s in 2021 and Elif Batuman’s “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy,” which was also published in Harper's in 2009 and then later collected in her book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People…

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Ryan Ruby joins us to discuss Susan Sontag’s “Approaching Artaud” and his own essay “Dig It Up Again,” which was written for the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and published last year by Poetry magazine.By The Point Magazine

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Siri Hustvedt joins us to discuss Simone Weil’s “Human Personality” and her own essay “Scapegoat,” which appears in her recent collection Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021).By The Point Magazine

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Carina del Valle Schorske joins us to discuss Samuel Delany's 1996 essay “Times Square Blue” and her 2019 essay “The Ladder Up: A Restless History of Washington Heights,” which was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review. (For more on Delany, check out this recent profile in the New Yorker by Julian Lucas.)…

On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Leo Robson and Rosa Lyster join us to discuss two essays by Martin Amis: “In Praise of Pritchett,” which appeared in the London Review of Books in 1980, and “The American Eagle,” an essay about Saul Bellow published in The Atlantic in 1995.…

On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Leslie Jamison joins us to discuss Charles D’Ambrosio’s 2002 essay “Documents” and her essay “The Empathy Exams,” which appeared in The Believer in 2014 and was the title of her first collection.By The Point Magazine

On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Jess Swoboda and Zach Fine talk to the writer Adam Shatz about James Baldwin's essay “Alas, Poor Richard” (1961), a eulogy of sorts for Richard Wright, and Adam's new book, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso 2023), which gathers a series of intellectual p…

On this bonus episode of “Selected Essays,” Merve Emre and Tobi Haslett discuss the great American essayists Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag. Merve and Tobi revisit their own essays about Hardwick and Sontag—published in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker—and consider why it’s hard to imagine critics like them …

On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Jess Swoboda and Zach Fine talk to the writer Anne Fadiman about Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” (1942) and Anne’s essay from the April 2023 issue of Harper’s, “Frog”—a eulogy of sorts for the family frog, Bunky, which was partially inspired by Woolf’s meditation on a moth flut…

On this episode of The Point Podcast, Jonny Thakkar talks to our resident anatomist of the global political zeitgeist: Anton Jäger, a historian of political thought at the Catholic University of Leuven. Anton joins us to discuss his essay for issue 29, “Everything Is Hyperpolitical,” an ambitious attempt at historicizing our hyperpolitical present,…

On this episode of The Point podcast, we’re introducing a new series called “Selected Essays”—about essays you should read but probably haven’t. Jess Swoboda and Zach Fine talk to the critic Christian Lorentzen about George Trow’s “Within the Context of No Context,” an essay that took up almost an entire issue of the New Yorker in 1980, and they re…

On this episode of The Point podcast, Jon Baskin talks to a fellow long-suffering Cavellian: the writer and New Left Review editor Lola Seaton. Lola joins us to discuss her essay for issue 28 of The Point, “The Sound Makes All the Difference,” on her relationship to Stanley Cavell’s unmistakable and infectious—if sometimes infuriating—writing style…

The Point podcast is back after a long hiatus with an episode about the 2022 midterms. Point editors Jon Baskin and Joey Keegin are joined by the journalist and native Ohioan James Pogue to debrief two key elections—JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. What will Vance's victory—and Master's defeat—mean for the National Conservative moveme…

Afterthoughts is a discussion series from The Point where our editors talk to writers and readers about new issues of the magazine. On this episode, a recording of a Zoom event held on November 1st, Jon and Rachel talk to literary critic Ryan Ruby (author of “Resisting Oblivion” in issue 25) and critic and Point editor Becca Rothfeld (author of “Sa…

Afterthoughts is a discussion series from The Point where our editors talk to writers and readers about new issues of the magazine. On this episode, Rachel, Jon and Joey are joined by Michelle Taylor and Daniel Silver to discuss their essays in issue 24.Essays discussed in this episode:“The Logic of the Like” by Daniel Silver: https://thepointmag.c…

3 entries and one derailment

2 topics for today discussing a derailment and rail graffiti

On Episode 3 of Rather Be Reading, Anastasia Berg interviews Andrea Long Chu about her debut essay in n+1 “On Liking Women” and the problem with trying to get our desires to conform to our political principles (1:03). Then Rachel Rosenfelt, the founding editor of the New Inquiry and new publisher of the New Republic, joins us to talk about the hist…

On Episode 2 of Rather Be Reading, The Point podcast, we discuss the #MeToo social media campaign, shitty media men, and moral education with Becca Rothfeld and Jennifer Frey (00:54). For Charitable Reading, Jon Baskin talks to literary critic Nicholas Dames about Franco Moretti and the so-called "digital humanities bust" (27:22). Plus, we call up …

Is there such a thing as a conservative intellectual? In the inaugural episode of Rather Be Reading, The Point Magazine podcast, we discuss the "What Happened to the Public Intellectual?" panel that we attended during the Brooklyn Book Festival and why there is resistance to the notion that conservative intellectuals exist. Plus, a "Charitable Read…