Essays
Last Boys at the Beginning of History
Thymos comes to the capital
[Mana Afsari]
“Well,” he laughs, “this is a little silly. But when I was little, I always wanted to do something great, and I would talk about that when I was a kid. And I’d have teachers and other people telling me: you can’t say that, you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. And then this guy comes on to the stage, eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”
Left-Wing Irony
An alternative to the politics of contempt
[Jessi Jezewska Stevens]
How should the left counter right-wing irony, if not by adopting the same destructive rhetorical strategies as Trump, or else slipping back into its own contemptuous habits? I have no wish to transform leftist rhetoric into a Trojan horse for chaos and conspiracy. But there are, happily, other options.
Among the Post-Feminists
From revolutionaries to realists
[Grazie Sophia Christie]
Even when sincerely believed, the “truths” of the post-feminists are alternative; their motives mixed, if not downright ulterior. Too often it seems like they are just performing a bit, in the theater immortalized by the iPhone camera. A going refrain on social media advises women that “delulu is the solulu”—delusion is the solution. But when you’re asking women to live for an improved future, to disengage from reality so as not to prop it up, it should be no surprise when they become skilled in the art of doublethink.
Performance Trouble
Gender and the pursuit of happiness
[Rafael Frumkin]
Was it not true that I—that she—had desired to become a he? That hers was a desiring self coterminous with his—with my—“authentic” one?
Correspondence
A Good Party
What was lost at the DNC
[Lauren Michele Jackson]
The party would prefer politics be anything—ineffectual, genocidal, even—but embarrassing.
Dialogue
The Real People
A conversation with Jan-Werner Müller
[Jan-Werner Müller and Jonny Thakkar]
“What for me matters the most about populism is not anti-elitism but what I call anti-pluralism: the tendency always to exclude others, pretty obviously at the level of party politics, but less obviously, and more dangerously, at the level of the people themselves.”
Literature
Everyone Is Innocent
[Elias Khoury]
Translated by Maia Tabet
“You mean to say that when this war’s over, you expect us to start fighting all over again?”
“Yeah, you got it! Once this war’s over, then the real war will start.”
“Well, don’t count on me. This war has just about exhausted us. One war is enough, Sir. Please, no more.”
In Memory of Mrs. K
[Carey Baraka]
I don’t know what it was, whether it was the chapatis themselves, or the heat outside, or the way the sweat made my clothes cling to my body, or the Swahili gospel music on the stereo, or the fact that here in Shakahola, a preacher had made hundreds—possibly thousands—starve themselves to death, or all these combined, but as I ate, I felt that I had rarely enjoyed food so much.
Deep Breath
[Harry Salmenniemi]
Translated by Henri Antikainen
He put the book down. He felt embarrassed to be reading a great Japanese modernist on top of a mushroom. He had a habit of regularly turning to Dazai’s book, but now it brought no comfort.
Reviews
Alt Lit
[Sam Kriss]
They go to parties and marry each other’s exes and write books about it, and then their friends all pretend those books are better than they actually are: this is the world. There have also always been writers who hate all this incest and clannishness so much that they barely write about anything else. Wyndham Lewis wrote Tarr more than a century ago and it’s one long howl against the smug pink scene of mediocre artists all living off their parents’ money. It’s Montparnasse instead of Dimes Square, but nothing really changes. The thing that actually matters about a scene is the work it produces. So I decided to read the work.
Trickle-Down Culture
[Emily Jashinsky]
People back home, I was told, were starting to watch Duck Dynasty, and I noticed myself getting deeper and deeper into country music, the stuff I grew up on, as the genre itself went full throttle on pushing stark cultural signifiers like trucks, beer and guns. I always thought I was just homesick, but looking back it seems more likely I was sick of being insulted.
Degrading Intimacy
[Apoorva Tadepalli]
I’ve heard women describe themselves as cowardly for staying in unsatisfying relationships with men, but surely there is something more precise to say about the nature of these attachments.
The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 34. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe now.
Letter from the Editors
A note on issue 34
[The Editors]
Mercifully, from the point of view of intellectual life, the history of culture records very few total victories. Which is one reason why those who feel emboldened by the “vibe shift” today would benefit from keeping in mind the fate of progressives who believed history was bending their way eight years ago.
On the New Romantics
[Becca Rothfeld]
No sooner had Donald Trump secured the presidency for a second time than the commentators began commentating and the prophets began prophesying. Trump would criminalize microplastics; he would build the long-awaited wall; he would Make America Great Again, again, maybe this time for good. Meanwhile, an elite coterie insisted that he would do something that he had never mentioned, even in his most meandering speeches: he would revitalize Culture.
Essays
Last Boys at the Beginning of History
Thymos comes to the capital
[Mana Afsari]
“Well,” he laughs, “this is a little silly. But when I was little, I always wanted to do something great, and I would talk about that when I was a kid. And I’d have teachers and other people telling me: you can’t say that, you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. And then this guy comes on to the stage, eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”
Left-Wing Irony
An alternative to the politics of contempt
[Jessi Jezewska Stevens]
How should the left counter right-wing irony, if not by adopting the same destructive rhetorical strategies as Trump, or else slipping back into its own contemptuous habits? I have no wish to transform leftist rhetoric into a Trojan horse for chaos and conspiracy. But there are, happily, other options.
Among the Post-Feminists
From revolutionaries to realists
[Grazie Sophia Christie]
Even when sincerely believed, the “truths” of the post-feminists are alternative; their motives mixed, if not downright ulterior. Too often it seems like they are just performing a bit, in the theater immortalized by the iPhone camera. A going refrain on social media advises women that “delulu is the solulu”—delusion is the solution. But when you’re asking women to live for an improved future, to disengage from reality so as not to prop it up, it should be no surprise when they become skilled in the art of doublethink.
Performance Trouble
Gender and the pursuit of happiness
[Rafael Frumkin]
Was it not true that I—that she—had desired to become a he? That hers was a desiring self coterminous with his—with my—“authentic” one?
Correspondence
A Good Party
What was lost at the DNC
[Lauren Michele Jackson]
The party would prefer politics be anything—ineffectual, genocidal, even—but embarrassing.
Dialogue
The Real People
A conversation with Jan-Werner Müller
[Jan-Werner Müller and Jonny Thakkar]
“What for me matters the most about populism is not anti-elitism but what I call anti-pluralism: the tendency always to exclude others, pretty obviously at the level of party politics, but less obviously, and more dangerously, at the level of the people themselves.”
Literature
Everyone Is Innocent
[Elias Khoury]
Translated by Maia Tabet
“You mean to say that when this war’s over, you expect us to start fighting all over again?”
“Yeah, you got it! Once this war’s over, then the real war will start.”
“Well, don’t count on me. This war has just about exhausted us. One war is enough, Sir. Please, no more.”
In Memory of Mrs. K
[Carey Baraka]
I don’t know what it was, whether it was the chapatis themselves, or the heat outside, or the way the sweat made my clothes cling to my body, or the Swahili gospel music on the stereo, or the fact that here in Shakahola, a preacher had made hundreds—possibly thousands—starve themselves to death, or all these combined, but as I ate, I felt that I had rarely enjoyed food so much.
Deep Breath
[Harry Salmenniemi]
Translated by Henri Antikainen
He put the book down. He felt embarrassed to be reading a great Japanese modernist on top of a mushroom. He had a habit of regularly turning to Dazai’s book, but now it brought no comfort.
Reviews
Alt Lit
[Sam Kriss]
They go to parties and marry each other’s exes and write books about it, and then their friends all pretend those books are better than they actually are: this is the world. There have also always been writers who hate all this incest and clannishness so much that they barely write about anything else. Wyndham Lewis wrote Tarr more than a century ago and it’s one long howl against the smug pink scene of mediocre artists all living off their parents’ money. It’s Montparnasse instead of Dimes Square, but nothing really changes. The thing that actually matters about a scene is the work it produces. So I decided to read the work.
Trickle-Down Culture
[Emily Jashinsky]
People back home, I was told, were starting to watch Duck Dynasty, and I noticed myself getting deeper and deeper into country music, the stuff I grew up on, as the genre itself went full throttle on pushing stark cultural signifiers like trucks, beer and guns. I always thought I was just homesick, but looking back it seems more likely I was sick of being insulted.
Degrading Intimacy
[Apoorva Tadepalli]
I’ve heard women describe themselves as cowardly for staying in unsatisfying relationships with men, but surely there is something more precise to say about the nature of these attachments.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.