The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 35.

The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 34.

As 2024 comes to a close, we’re proud to present our most-read essays of the year, listed below in reverse order.

This issue on violence, the second The Point has ever devoted fully to a theme, was conceived in response to a number of questions or…

No sooner had Donald Trump secured the presidency for a second time than the commentators began commentating and the prophets began prophesying.

Mercifully, from the point of view of intellectual life, the history of culture records very few total victories.

“To some extent—to a large extent—maintaining one’s innocence is self-delusion.”

A conversation with Quinn Slobodian

The Australian writer Jessica Zhan Mei Yu and I spent several months exchanging emails about her 2023 novel, But the Girl, and the affinities between…

This essay is a preview of our forthcoming print issue, which features the symposium “What is college for?”

INTRODUCTION The subtitle of Martin Hägglund’s new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, indicates its ambition. In the first half of This Life,…

Photography, wrote Susan Sontag, is “the gentlest of predations.” But is photography necessarily a violation? What is actually involved in the work of documenting violence?…

This winter we surveyed hundreds of people—of all genders—about what they think men are for.

What does it mean to face the question of beauty every day, not just personally but professionally? This spring we surveyed models, cosmetic physicians, influencers…

Introduction These notes are not a blueprint for how to write a school statement, or a script for how teachers should tackle hot-button topics. In…

In light of Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race over widespread concerns about his age and mental fitness, The Point has assembled…

Intellectual Ex-Radicals and World Reaction: The Crisis of the Disillusioned Fellow-Travelers of Bolshevism Is Not the Same as a “Crisis of Marxism” (Trotsky 1939) The Intellectual:…

alt right: i) right-wing racists who use leftist rhetoric. ii) establishment.

Classics, the: force of oppression. Know enough to despise ~: “Plato was an authoritarian.” “Aristotle condoned slavery.”

It was a crisp March morning in Austin, and just outside the Texas Capitol a swarm of protesters large enough to fill a sports arena…

We didn’t know her. What an opportunity. She could have said, been, anything.

What was really at stake in this election was something closer to the existential: whether this utopian experiment would live on, or needed to be…

As soon as the owner of an old wardrobe/television/bicycle pushes it off the ramp, as soon as it’s “in there,” as they say at the…

I’m still breathing, I’ll tell her, and so are those around me.

“You mean to say that when this war’s over, you expect us to start fighting all over again?”

By some indicators we are entering a new Dark Age: anti-intellectual fervor is raging, suspicion of experts is at an all-time high and appeals to…

Finally, in Samuel Beckett, we have our poet-laureate of climate change.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America arrives at an auspicious time. The French sociologist came initially to America to prepare a report on criminal justice,…

This is the first column in the fourth round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond…

This is the third column in the third round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond to a prompt…

This is the second column in the third round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond to…

What is the root of that thing that feels magical when we “just know,” or when we’re overcome by that “gust of agitation,” or when…

“I think I’m just sexually attracted to women who are conventionally hot, and that tends to mean ‘not 55.’ But it somehow feels, I dunno,…

You’re right: much of sex does feel like theater. But what kind of theater is it?