The Point Podcast

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).

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.

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 portraits of great thinkers and writers s...

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 existing today.  For more where that came from,...

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 fluttering back and forth across a window pane. 

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, which he diagnoses as the culmination of a trajec...

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 revisit Christian’s cover story from the April 201...

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. Timestamps: Literature as an act of communicatio...

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 movement that has embraced them? Jon, James an...

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 “Sanctimony Literature” in Liberties) for a discussio...

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.com/examined-life/the-logic-of-the-like/“No One Is...

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 history of Occupy at leftist magazines and the future...

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 comedian David Heti to get his opinion o...

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 Reading" segment on why lefties de...