“Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind,” wrote the liberal critic Lionel Trilling, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like.”” thepointmag.com/politics/on-...

New online, Alex Gendler on Voice of America’s downfall and the end of soft power:

An AI-driven reconstruction of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS @newyorker.com, Wes Anderson @thepointmag.bsky.social, Michael Almereyda @nytimes.com + @hammertonail.bsky.social + @screenslate.bsky.social, @szacharek.bsky.social on the underappreciated … Did You See This? www.criterion.com/current/post...

super thoughtful, well laid out essay about reading literature in schools and progressive ed loved this part about a character in Brave New World reading Shakespeare on his own, and how, lacking a broader context where others have also read and discussed Shakespeare, the books don’t save him

Ah that feeling when you read something that says everything you're currently trying to write, but better. Love this piece on progressive education by @annieabrams.bsky.social: thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

"Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity." || via @thepointmag.bsky.social

From the new issue, Becca Rothfeld on two recent books that “typify the liberal tendency to fiddle while Rome goes up in flames”: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” and Cass Sunstein’s “On Liberalism”:

great article by Jensen Suther on the faults of degrowth Marxism thepointmag.com/politics/rad...

With Russia's full-scale invasion, contextualizing Ukraine’s Soviet past became more complicated than ever. An essay I wrote for @thepointmag.bsky.social looks at what its meant for the museum holding Ukraine's largest collection of Soviet socialist realist art. thepointmag.com/corresponden...

wonderful piece on the life of a smoker — and the process of quitting — by @johnphipps.bsky.social thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

“Education is for the student’s benefit, not for the benefit of their future employer…students go to school not merely to acquire skills but to develop an entire social and intellectual life: to have something good and to have it forever” @thepointmag.bsky.social thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Enjoying Becca Rothfeld's skewering of "Abundance" and Cass Sunstein's latest thepointmag.com/criticism/li...

I really love that Annie’s work doesn’t simply defend the liberal arts, it actively demonstrates how taking up its texts & traditions can provide invaluable insight into contemporary issues. English classes should be invitations to appreciate, enjoy, & contribute to living traditions & communities.

A poignant, poetic take on the waning Canadian migrant dream, and the very hot, present, (im)migrant pivot across the globe. Vikrant Dadawala is clear-eyed and nuanced about his grasp of the situation and where he himself stands in it: thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

"Teachers can show students what has moved others to use language with care...and invite them to join a long tradition of people who have found a way to say something new." - @annieabrams.bsky.social, in a crucial essay on the struggle for liberal education. thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

"Forms of labor that conserve, fix, make and care for others once had a place in the mythos of America, not to mention on the mantle of the Old Left." Extraordinary essay about what the last year has been like in DC by Noelle Bodick in @thepointmag.bsky.social thepointmag.com/politics/rig...

“calling our current public-education policy ‘progressive’ is, read most generously, imprecise” great essay about what progressive education ought to aim for—one that hopefully clarifies things not only for the Tates of the world, but also for those of us who aim to do this kind of work ourselves.

For @thepointmag.bsky.social I wrote one of the most personally important essays I’ve ever written. Please give it a read if you’re someone who cares about education. thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

Issue 36—featuring a forum on the left and the good life and essays on D.C. after DOGE, Wes Anderson, Soviet Ukrainian art under threat, and much more—is now online! Read it here: thepointmag.com/issue/issue-36/

Issue 36: The left and the good life | Coming soon.

“The good life my upbringing had laid out for me was something like this: hustle your way into a T-20 for business or computer science, work up to a middle-management position in Jersey, die. Raritan showed there was a path out.”

A new installment of @bdmcclay.bsky.social’s column on speculative fiction, on the true aliens among us and Craig Strete’s talent for depicting them: thepointmag.com/criticism/th...

I was delighted to be part of this forum in The Point, writing about education and great books not only as part of the good life that those of us on the left are trying to make possible for everyone but as an invaluable way to help us become free enough to live that life.

Issue 36—which features a forum on the left and the good life—is coming soon. Check out the annotated table of contents for an extended preview:

New online, Sheena Meng memorializes “Raritan,” and the intellectual and aesthetic experience it initiated her into:

"Human beings transform only when we refuse to cordon ourselves off from each other behind a vulgar individualism." thepointmag.com/politics/eli...

Over at The Point, I went long and deep on Art Bell, proto-podcaster, wizard of the American Weird. thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

First published in 1971, the animating question of “Divine Right’s Trip” still feels like an urgent one: In an increasingly networked world, what would it mean to return home, and to forge a literature that was rooted in place?

New online, Tim Leonido on Gurney Norman’s reissued novel of 1960s counterculture, and the alternative it posed to an emerging vision of digital, networked connection:

On today’s new episode of Selected Novels—the last of the season!—Jess Swoboda and Zach Fine talk to Austyn Wohlers about Clarice Lispector’s “Near to the Wild Heart”:

New online, Adam Fleming Petty on why Art Bell might help us understand our experience of podcasting today:

New online, Sarah Hammerschlag on Levinas, Israel, and the risks of forging a Jewish identity out of suffering:

there is something about the nature of Asad’s work which makes this all the more devastating. not only was it impossibly sharp, but it was also deeply committed to using thought and theory to build an emancipatory politics. thepointmag.com/politics/pol...

Notes on Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay Notes on American Fascism, which was dismissed at the time but now seems prescient. [thepointmag.com]

On today’s new episode of Selected Novels, Zach Fine and Jess Swoboda talk to Maya Binyam about Sam Selvon’s “The Lonely Londoners,” a formative, enlivening novel that changed her conception of what literary prose could be like.

“Horror seems cathartic, or psychically protective—a safe ritual that admits the reality of violence and cruelty while also warding it off, like a ceremonial demon mask.” Mary Gaitskill in an essay that appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of @thepointmag.bsky.social.

New on Substack, Jon Baskin on Knausgaard, Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace’s call for “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction”... and how it all relates to the Harper’s essay on gooning.

New on Substack, Jon Baskin and Mike Lipkin continue our series of conversations on graduate education by asking: What does it mean to say humanistic scholars “produce knowledge” in the first place? And is it important to ask what this knowledge is “for”?

New online, Michael Barron on the personal achievement at the heart of Michael Lentz’s “Schattenfroh”:

New online: Robert Pippin, @agcallard.bsky.social, Ben Jeffery, Rory O’Connell, Laura Baudot, Thomas Bartscherer, Jonny Thakkar, Jon Baskin, Leon Wieseltier and J.M. Coetzee remember Jonathan Lear.

New online, Barry Schwabsky on a new translation of “The Flowers of Evil,” and finding a Baudelaire for our time:

New on Forms of Life, Noah Swank on the political trap of AI-generated MAGA art:

Lillian Fishman on the Fitzcarraldo classes’ fear of porn. Really very good. ‘It’s a commonplace that all the best things in life arrive at the edge of hurt, as a result of risk.’ (Love, for one.) ‘Why do we think sex is the exception?’ thepointmag.com/criticism/th...

New online, @saffron.bsky.social on what it means to measure intelligence, in large language models and in us:

New on our Substack, an @interintellect.bsky.social conversation between Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg on whether the fight for liberal education can be anything but a losing battle:

“'Higher' education shouldn’t be higher just in its cost or in years—like it’s your thirteenth or fourteenth year of school. No, we should be thinking in terms of your highest aspirations as a human person." - Jennifer Frey over at @thepointmag.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/thepoint...

New on Forms of Life, a dispatch from the first Charlie Kirk memorial in Latin America:

From the archive, Peter Marshall on this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, László Krasznahorkai, and his artistic evolution from apocalyptic tragicomedy to calm reconciliation: