The Point

A reflection on the culture of complaint.

How should we engage with philosophy?

How the like button has transformed the very root of culture.

How the vital functions of culture have changed.

A new strategy for dealing with damnation.

What is so special about humanity and our ability to think?

Greil Marcus’ book offers insight into the distinctly crass and fleeting modern American dream.

Analysing the sexual liberty of the Weimar Republic.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to lead a life of abstinence?

A marvel that stops us in our tracks becomes only an apparent marvel once explained.

Exploring the late David Graeber's thoughts on why we work.

A reflection of the worker and the artwork.

A remarkable, personal reflection on understanding where we come from.

Stories can connect us, and often changes us.

Is a declining human population really something to regret?

A reflection on Iran's modern history through the life of activist and filmmaker Haroun Yashayaie.

A thoughtful essay on being a parent and a commitment to the passing of generations.

In light of the #MeToo movement, Nora Caplan-Bricker, writing in The Point Magazine, revisits a utopian novel from 1915 about a society composed entirely of women.

Why do people scale the world’s tallest mountains? What are they hoping to find at the summit?

Is there anything to be said in defense of arseholes? I’d imagine that if you’re inclined to label someone as such in the first place, you’d probably think, “no, there isn’t.” But Jonny Thakkar, a self-identifying arsehole, makes the case.

Not all aspects of women’s labour need more public recognition. Dawn Herrera Helphand reflects on the sheltering power of privacy in childbirth.

The strength of the iceberg lies unseen and submerged, like Freud’s sub-conscious or Hemingway’s theory of writing. George Philip LeBourdais travels to Greenland and meditates on the cultural significance of the now melting ice.

The end of the road trip.

Is New Work going to change the world?

The renowned author's explanation of the 2008 crash offers lessons for today's economic landscape.

What can we learn from it?

Small talk or idle talk is often looked down upon as inauthentic and mindless. Dora Zhang writing in The Point Magazine engages in an indepth examination of small talk. Does superficial talk reduce the space for deliberate and deep conversation that requires thought, or does small talk actually serve an essential purpose of socialisation?

Palme d'Or-winning Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami died on the 4th July 2016. We revisit a profile of the veteran director, screenwriter and producer by Kyle Smith, first published by the Point Magazine back in 2010.

What should we do with our lives? Follow our dreams and passions? Or take the more certain route towards money and power, so our lives can have more “effect”? Jonah Galeota-Sprung’s deeply personal piece from The Point Magazine – one of The Atantic’s “Slightly More than 100 Exceptional works of Journalism” from 2015.

Megan Marz writing in The Point Magazine offers us an examination of the advice column, with a special insight into Kristen Dombek and Heather Havrilesky – columnists who have elevated the advice column to a literary form, while “seeking to help you without driving you further into yourself”.

The ersatz dialogue which occurs on Twitter can give the misleading impression that all opposing opinions have been given a fair hearing, and thus that the dominant opinion at the end of the day must be the inherently superior one. At the same time, if you maintain a bit of critical distance, watching the construction of conventional wisdom on Twitter can teach you plenty.

Adam Bright reflects on one of the New Age movement’s more prominent thinkers.

The UK will be leaving the EU. But how was the prospect of such a political rupture seen months before the vote even took play? From February 2016.

Space used to signify pure tomorrow, an infinite frontier unrolling in all directions. Now, for those few who still nurse them, the arc of those daydreams has doubled back toward the past, bent by nostalgia.

We are constantly monitored, not just by the NSA, but by every website we visit, every app we use and every message we send. As being monitored becomes a part of everyday life, Lowry Pressly writing in The Point Magazine examines the meaning of the term privacy and what it means to be monitored.

Reviewing Michael Clune's book 'Gamelife' in The Point Magazine, Andrew Blevins relays the author’s long relationship with video games. Much unlike Clune’s addiction to heroin (on which he elaborated in his previous book), Clune has no regrets about his addiction to video games.

Taxidermy literally means “the arrangement (taxi) of skin (derma).” It is the precise splitting of skin into hide, hide into pieces of hide, and then the reassembly of this hide upon the bones to form a reimagined body.

We reflect on Bill Cosby's fall from grace after his October 2019 trial.

As Salah Abdeslam, one of the key suspects in the Paris attacks is jailed in Belgium, we revisit an essay on the terrible night.

Thomas Berenato writes in The Point Magazine to celebrate the English poet Christopher Logue, best known for his account of several books of Homer.

We now listen to Daniel Luban’s essay from The Point Magazine, where he provides us with an indepth and fascinating examination of Francis Fukuyama and his theories.

We live in an age where every holiday taken is a moment, a memory to be shared on Instagram and Facebook. Charles Comey writing in The Point Magazine writes about honeymoons, specifically his honeymoon, and the pressure it creates on the participant to be something special. And just how enjoyable and special does it end up being then?

I attended Donald Trump’s failed rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a mole, hoping I could slip in unnoticed among his thousands of supporters and get a look at the inner workings of a movement whose size and intensity has become a source of international fascination.

The myth of the melancholy genius. Montaigne, van Gogh, David Foster Wallace: society celebrates the aesthetic insights of depression

Writing in The Point, Meghan O’Gieblyn ponders Gabrielle Glaser's famous 'takedown' of Alcoholics Anonymous in Atlantic, published in 2015. Glaser wrote “The problem is that nothing about the 12-step approach draws on modern science”. Is that true? And if it is, does that matter?

PETA is widely known to kill almost all of the animals it takes in, a practice that has expectedly generated immense debate, with PETA itself claiming that it only kills animals that are suffering and have no alternative. Using this as a backdrop, Gary Francione writing in The Point Magazine examines the moral question behind killing animals.

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. A contest was held to decide who would have the honor of designing it. Every sculptor in Czechoslovakia was required to participate. Most sabotaged their chances on purpose by portraying the great leader in unsuitable poses, smiling or spreading his arms like Jesus. Otakar Švec who learned the art of sculpture as a child from his pastry-chef father, took the extra precaution of getting blind drunk. Unfortunately for him, he won anyway.

As we seem to be reaching a critical time for democracy, where so many Americans seem exhausted enough with it that they see substance in all of Trump’s incoherence, Danielle Charette writing in The Point Magazine, revisits Robert Penn Warren, the American poet and author. As a poet who could acknowledge the pitfalls of populism and go on to write for a democratic audience anyhow, his work offers up a form for holding up our democratic discontent, she writes.

Frank Guan writing in The Point Magazine, examines poetry, its class character, racial bent and political power. He praises poet Claudia Rankine, 2016 Macarthur Fellow, for her “transformation of the lyric nature poem” into a medium for political expression.

Why do we love books? Not those things you can read on your Kindle, but the ones you can see and feel and touch and smell? Jake Bittle, writing in The Point Magazine, investigates.

The victory of Donald Trump has left the liberal demographic in a state of mourning and the Democrats in disarray. Malloy Owen writing in The Point Magazine looks to an unlikely source – the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt – for guidance on the way forward. It is time to stop using apparently pragmatic arguments against discrimination and to start repoliticizing, he writes.

Christopher Fenwick delves into the world of quizzing and explores the workings of the mind of the avid quizzer.

Writing in The Point Magazine, David Unger describes his experiences at a three day Failure Festival: a chance to let things go horribly wrong in public, and challenge society’s obsession with success.

When masses of people come together in protest, what is it that brings them together? A sense of combined solidarity? Or are they all actually “alone with everyone?” And what does that mean? Sustained activist, Miranda Trimmier writes about all of that and more, in The Point Magazine.