Education & Society
Schooling Myself
Lessons from an autodidact
[Elisa Gonzalez]
At five, I read Pride and Prejudice, then the rest of Austen. At eight, War and Peace, then Anna Karenina. I moved on to Dostoevsky, reading Crime and Punishment and The Idiot aloud to my mother as she cooked dinner. At ten, I read through all of Shakespeare. At eleven, the Iliad and Odyssey. These examples are plucked from an experience of reading more like being swept downstream than picking my way carefully from rock to rock. I’d have liked to drown, I think.
Beyond Neutrality
The university’s responsibility to lead
[Agnes Callard]
I would classify neutrality in the way that Aristotle classifies shame: the half-virtue of the learner. It makes no more sense to pride oneself on being neutral than to pride oneself on feeling ashamed.
The Velvet Ditch
Fear and loathing in Faulkner country
[Jennie Lightweis-Goff]
Academic hiring, a mentor told me, is best thought of as a bad first date at the end of which you nonetheless consent to marriage.
Commit Lit
In search of higher education
[Joseph M. Keegin]
Whereas the quit-lit canon depicted the academic humanities as a charnel house of competition and hopelessness, it was to become for me an oasis: a place where I could observe and contemplate, from however small a remove, the riddles of existence revealed in everyday life.
Essays
Everything Is Out of Water
Should a philosopher have sayings?
[Nandi Theunissen]
Thales gives us not, with Plato, ten books of the Republic, nor, with Kant, a deduction of the moral law, but just a flat little line. Is it a problem of “laconic brevity”? Or is the problem that the saying is not worthy of a sage—not least one reputed to have spent time with priests in Egypt? Although I remain open to the form of a saying, I am not content with a line from the playground. I would like something that is more, frankly, esoteric.
Popular History
Uses and abuses
[Scott Spillman]
In broader public discussions it often seems to be taken for granted that history, and historians, can help us to understand the problems we face. But this consensus obscures deep disagreements about what that help should look like. So it is worth asking: What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?
Teeth
Or, the role of the mouth in the beauty of the face
[Jacob Mikanowski]
This is what Zosia’s dental-school exam should have asked. Not about the role of the mouth in the beauty of the face, but teeth as the memory of the body. For in a very real way, teeth remember all.
Literature
The Screen
[Marosia Castaldi]
Translated by Jamie Richards
The screen is very tall. It can’t be passed over or under or around or beside, has no gaps or passageways. Beyond its walls the dead stop or circle round and round waiting for someone to notice them.
Reviews
Anorexia and Autonomy
[Rachel Fraser]
“My body is for me. Your body is for you,” says Manne. But is my body just for me? Can I separate out my own wants from others’ preferences? I want to be desired. I want to be needed. What those others need and desire, then, will always be threaded into what I need and desire.
Céline’s War
[Michael W. Clune]
Satire is just dark comedy’s alibi, a way for critics to render their attraction to the genre compatible with morality and self-respect. War is a satire on war in the same sense that getting shot is a satire on guns, or being trampled to death by a hippo is a satire on evolution, or junkies are a satire on drugs, or a piss stain is a satire on clean pants.
Percival Everett’s Great Books
[Joel Rhone]
The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 33. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe now.
Letter from the Editors
On Students
[Jon Baskin]
Are there alternatives to viewing students as either mere containers for the ideologies of their elders or infallible guides to progress?
Etymology
Academic Freedom
“I talked with another professor at Chicago, who does not want his name used. I asked him what he thought about the status of his profession, and he gave the best description of academic freedom in America that I have yet come upon. He said: “We are good cows; we stand quietly in our stanchions, and give down our milk at regular hours. We are free, because we have no desire to do anything but what we are told we ought to do. And we die of premature senility.”
Forms of Life
Campus Reports
We ended up arguing with President Paxson rather than President Biden; we had to free ourselves from conduct violations in lieu of actually liberating others.
Education & Society
Schooling Myself
Lessons from an autodidact
[Elisa Gonzalez]
At five, I read Pride and Prejudice, then the rest of Austen. At eight, War and Peace, then Anna Karenina. I moved on to Dostoevsky, reading Crime and Punishment and The Idiot aloud to my mother as she cooked dinner. At ten, I read through all of Shakespeare. At eleven, the Iliad and Odyssey. These examples are plucked from an experience of reading more like being swept downstream than picking my way carefully from rock to rock. I’d have liked to drown, I think.
Beyond Neutrality
The university’s responsibility to lead
[Agnes Callard]
I would classify neutrality in the way that Aristotle classifies shame: the half-virtue of the learner. It makes no more sense to pride oneself on being neutral than to pride oneself on feeling ashamed.
The Velvet Ditch
Fear and loathing in Faulkner country
[Jennie Lightweis-Goff]
Academic hiring, a mentor told me, is best thought of as a bad first date at the end of which you nonetheless consent to marriage.
Commit Lit
In search of higher education
[Joseph M. Keegin]
Whereas the quit-lit canon depicted the academic humanities as a charnel house of competition and hopelessness, it was to become for me an oasis: a place where I could observe and contemplate, from however small a remove, the riddles of existence revealed in everyday life.
Essays
Everything Is Out of Water
Should a philosopher have sayings?
[Nandi Theunissen]
Thales gives us not, with Plato, ten books of the Republic, nor, with Kant, a deduction of the moral law, but just a flat little line. Is it a problem of “laconic brevity”? Or is the problem that the saying is not worthy of a sage—not least one reputed to have spent time with priests in Egypt? Although I remain open to the form of a saying, I am not content with a line from the playground. I would like something that is more, frankly, esoteric.
Popular History
Uses and abuses
[Scott Spillman]
In broader public discussions it often seems to be taken for granted that history, and historians, can help us to understand the problems we face. But this consensus obscures deep disagreements about what that help should look like. So it is worth asking: What role do we really want history to be playing in our public life? And is the history we have actually doing that work?
Teeth
Or, the role of the mouth in the beauty of the face
[Jacob Mikanowski]
This is what Zosia’s dental-school exam should have asked. Not about the role of the mouth in the beauty of the face, but teeth as the memory of the body. For in a very real way, teeth remember all.
Literature
The Screen
[Marosia Castaldi]
Translated by Jamie Richards
The screen is very tall. It can’t be passed over or under or around or beside, has no gaps or passageways. Beyond its walls the dead stop or circle round and round waiting for someone to notice them.
Reviews
Anorexia and Autonomy
[Rachel Fraser]
“My body is for me. Your body is for you,” says Manne. But is my body just for me? Can I separate out my own wants from others’ preferences? I want to be desired. I want to be needed. What those others need and desire, then, will always be threaded into what I need and desire.
Céline’s War
[Michael W. Clune]
Satire is just dark comedy’s alibi, a way for critics to render their attraction to the genre compatible with morality and self-respect. War is a satire on war in the same sense that getting shot is a satire on guns, or being trampled to death by a hippo is a satire on evolution, or junkies are a satire on drugs, or a piss stain is a satire on clean pants.
Percival Everett’s Great Books
[Joel Rhone]
Taken together, the sum of Everett’s recent fiction implies a more pointed set of aims and interests than what his more obscure aestheticism could have accommodated. If what we’ve been reading indicates something other than a compromise of artistic integrity—or to put it more crudely, a classic case of “selling out”—then what else might we make of this reorientation?
Jeopardy!
[Ben Cosman]
In the few minutes I had to make my wager, between the reveal of Art and the clue itself (pertaining to the provenance of American Gothic), I was thinking mostly about the limits of my own thinking, of how much there was that I didn’t know, and how I was being challenged on syndicated television by my own ignorance—and my own fear of facing that ignorance.
If You Liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.