The Point Audio
We know you’d rather be reading, but for those times when listening is easier, we offer audio versions of our essays (in partnership with Curio.io) and an original (if intermittently updated) podcast. Tune in here and if you like what you here, subscribe to our podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes.
Curio brings you outstanding print content as audio, brought alive by great narrators. Every day we introduce you to new audio content from top publications like The Point, so you’ll always have the best in stories, ideas, arguments, scientific breakthroughs, sports, philosophical debates, satire and more to listen to.
Leaving Herland
Imagine a world without men. Imagine it occurred as a natural experiment.
Climbing Kanchenjunga
One American climbing writer thought that Polish climbing was synonymous with “exquisite” suffering…
On Being an Arsehole
A defense
Driving America
The failure of life to live up to literature is of course nothing new, although the road-trip myth is both particularly seductive and particularly misleading.
Into the Cave
Like many women with countercultural affinities and too much education, when I got pregnant I began planning for a “natural,” i.e. drug-free, childbirth.
Icebergs
The diminutive iceberg was an afterthought by the time it broke apart.
Being Known
Is there harm in being observed if I never find out about it?
Don’t Mourn, Repoliticize!
At around 11 p.m. on November 8th, Americans discovered that we’re still living in Carl Schmitt’s world.
How Should an Advice Column Be?
It’s a reciprocal, participatory literature.
Against Honeymoons
The strange and tricky thing about a honeymoon is that even while it’s happening, it’s already lived as a story.
Forward with Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama was 36 years old in 1989 when “The End of History?” made him a star.
Small Talk
I recently found myself sitting across a table from a stranger, chewing awkwardly in silence. It was a familiar scenario: a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop with not enough tables and me sitting alone.
Demagoguery and Poetry
Long before Donald Trump, there was the homegrown demagoguery of Robert Penn Warren’s Willie Stark.
Fail Again
None of us could say we weren’t prepared for improvisation. The ads for the Failure Festival read more like warnings.
Hearts and Minds
At my high school, the New York Times was something of a secular religion and Nicholas Kristof was its Mother Teresa.
New Work
New Work sounded great! Plenty of free time.
War Music
The English poet Christopher Logue called himself a “Catholic atheist.” Were he religious, he said, he would look out for God in creation. “Did the ancient Greeks believe in their gods as I believe in the ancient Greeks?” he wondered.
Crowd Love
It kicked off the way many sketchy temp jobs do: I read a Craigslist ad, wrote an email, received an email, and the next day found myself in a big room with a bunch of other underemployed people waiting to interview for the gig.
Who Did It?
The undemanding quality of Lewis’s books made him an appealing guide to the financial crisis in the years immediately following 2008. He simplified, explained and entertained at a time when readers didn’t know what to think about the crisis or what to expect from it.
Effected
Like lots of things on the internet, EA feels marketed right to our social group: young, educated, confused little guys, swimming the God’s-dead world in search of some half-decent values.
Paper Chasing
Delight in book collecting, and in showing off one’s book collection, is common, if not universal, among readers and would-be-readers.
The Time of the Assassins
That is the fragile and desirable good, and it is what gets corroded, so quickly and devastatingly, in the wake of terrorist attacks.
Himself
Affixed to a folding chair in the center of the stage, Bill Cosby performed his two-hour routine that February afternoon in 2004.
Abbas Kiarostami's Transcendental Style
The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has repeatedly said he enjoys it when audiences fall asleep during his films.
Brexit and the Facts
In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined, visualized, analyzed and interpreted however we wish.
The Totality of Facts
It’s the first day of the 2013 European Quizzing Championships in Liverpool and I’m sitting next to Jesse Honey—English national team member, winner of the game show Mastermind and the 2012 World Quizzing Champion.
The People’s Republic
On the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the United States government careened into a shutdown.
Now They Were Corpses
Whether this consonance is a conscious marketing tactic or a coincidence, these titles play on English readers’ association of Iraq with corpses.
Outrage
Whenever I hear big political news I reflexively reach for my phone to check Twitter.
Fear and Loathing
I attended Donald Trump’s failed rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a mole.
Here, Now
We should begin with a confession: by most metrics, I’m a New Age nut.
Gamelife
Now that I’m an “adult,” I sometimes wish I’d listened to my parents when they tried to get me to stop playing video games.
Kids
When Larry Clark’s film came out in the summer of 1995, I was too young to sneak into a theater.
The Shuttle Era
Space used to signify pure tomorrow, an infinite frontier unrolling in all directions.
The Insane Idea
Beneath the number crunching and the medical jargon lies the conviction that AA is not just ineffective but incoherent, repellent even.
What’s Left Over
We lived in the woods then, my parents and sisters and brother and I, tucked into the corner of a former commune.
Starving
Every semester I make the mistake of teaching Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” in my Intro to Literature class.
Stalin’s Finger
In 1949, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia decided to honor Stalin by building a monument to him in Prague.
Melancholy
Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning.
Rather Be Reading: The Point Podcast
Listen to our three episodes, on such topics as: bad desires, sex pests and conservative intellectuals.