recommended monday morning reading: thepointmag.com/politics/bey...

Before the war, my biggest teaching worry was AI-generated content submitted for essay assignments. Now I receive messages from students tending to wounded relatives in the hospital… it doesn’t take long before everyone knows someone affected by the bombing thepointmag.com/forms-of-lif...

Zeead Yaghi on Israel’s war on Lebanon, a campaign that has produced massive destruction, displacement, and terror, while also reigniting sectarian tension. A harrowing article. thepointmag.com/forms-of-lif...

New on Forms of Life, Zeead Yaghi on sectarianism at its breaking point in Lebanon, and Israel’s strategy of stoking it:

My sister and her family — husband, four-year-old, two-year-old — live in Beirut. They are still there, still trying to teach at AUB and still trying to keep their kids' lives normal despite constant disruptions. I think about them constantly. Her husband wrote this. thepointmag.com/forms-of-lif...

New on Forms of Life, a dispatch from DeVan Ard on the first week of conflict in Beirut:

“[O]nce I was relieved of the burden of having to figure out the answer to the other, I could more clearly see and appreciate the complex mystery of whoever stood before me” Parker Henry’s beautifully personal review of Hopwood’s The Moral Philosophy of Iris Murdoch thepointmag.com/criticism/mo...

In his recent book on the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch, Mark Hopwood gives us “a Murdoch who is no longer just a defective analytic philosopher, but a thinker in a tradition of her own,” writes Parker Henry:

New online, a web supplement to our issue 36 forum on the left and the good life: Ege Yumuşak on making space for political engagement in everyday life.

Applications are open for our fully funded Summer Workshops on the philosophy and practice of public thinking—an incredible opportunity for college students interested in writing and engaging the public. Learn More: www.publicthinking.thepointmag.com/workshop

"We can excuse someone being an asshole if they go on to do great things, if they do the things we can’t. There’s much less to sympathize with in the asshole who ends up choosing the small life like the rest of us." @zeets.bsky.social on "Marty Supreme". thepointmag.com/forms-of-lif...

Really good piece on the stylelessness of liberals: 'There is no liberal Joe Rogan because his liberal equivalent would rather soliloquize and tweak a couple of ordinances than enter into an unscripted tête-à-tête for hours.' thepointmag.com/criticism/li...

I wrote about Marty Supreme and the problem with writing a compelling unlikable protagonist and then undercutting him at the end in the name of sentimentality thepointmag.com/forms-of-lif...

New on Forms of Life, @zeets.bsky.social on sports movies, “Marty Supreme,” and the trouble with its ending:

“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...