Top Ten of 2024
As 2024 comes to a close, we’re proud to present our most-read essays of the year, listed below in reverse order.
On the Old Romantics
No sooner had Donald Trump secured the presidency for a second time than the commentators began commentating and the prophets began prophesying.
Note on Issue 34
Mercifully, from the point of view of intellectual life, the history of culture records very few total victories.
On Students
As the campus protests against the war in Gaza spread across the country this past spring, affecting hundreds of colleges and resulting in the arrest…
A Powerless Form
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…
The Real People
Jan-Werner Müller is a political philosopher and historian of ideas who teaches at Princeton University.
Seeing Things as They Are
Ken Silverstein is that rare thing in the world of today’s journalism: an old-school muckraker.
When Meghan Married Harry
This essay is a preview of our forthcoming print issue, which features the symposium “What is college for?”
Limited Time
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,…
Manhood
This winter we surveyed hundreds of people—of all genders—about what they think men are for.
The Beauty Industry
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…
Working in Tech
What is it like to work in tech every day? This winter we surveyed people who work in tech about their jobs, common misconceptions about…
Notes Toward a Preface About School Statements
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…
Age-Old Wisdom
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…
Intellectuals in Crisis
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:…
The Crisis of Language Project
alt right: i) right-wing racists who use leftist rhetoric. ii) establishment.
The (Updated) Dictionary of Received Ideas
Classics, the: force of oppression. Know enough to despise ~: “Plato was an authoritarian.” “Aristotle condoned slavery.”
Another World
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…
Ruins upon Ruins
The battles of late medieval times have had a long, poisonous afterlife in this part of the world, and there is something ominous about Vijayanagara’s…
Everyone Is Innocent
“You mean to say that when this war’s over, you expect us to start fighting all over again?”
Deep Breath
He put the book down. He felt embarrassed to be reading a great Japanese modernist on top of a mushroom.
In Memory of Mrs. K
Leonora called me and told me that Mrs. K had disappeared. “Disappeared?” I asked stupidly. “What do you mean, disappeared?”
The Life of the Mind
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…
Democracy in America
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,…
Back to Real Life
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…
Restless Minds
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…
Guilt Lit
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…
Does Love Just Happen to Us?
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…
Inappropriate Desires
“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,…
Performance Issues
You’re right: much of sex does feel like theater. But what kind of theater is it?