The Point Podcast

Selected Essays | Christian Lorentzen on George Trow

Apr 11, 2023

59:17

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Episode notes

Introduction

3min

Deborah Friedel's Nightmare

2min

The Culture of Narcissism

2min

The City in the Mist

4min

The Power of No History

3min

The Role of Television in the History of Television

5min

The Death of the Attention Economy

5min

Tro's Vision for a Better American Culture

2min

The Importance of Agreements in the Age of Television

4min

10.

The New Yorker's Most Extreme Nonfiction

2min

11.

The Importance of Gen X Writing in the New Yorker

4min

12.

The Fragmented Sections of the Atlantic City Essay

3min

13.

The Power of Writing

2min

14.

The Power of the Word Like

2min

15.

The Relationship Between Tro's No Context and the 2019 Harper's Piece

5min

16.

How to Write an Aphoristic Piece

1min

17.

The Decline of the Book Review

6min

18.

The Power of the Book Review

5min

On this episode of The Point podcast, we’re introducing a new series called “Selected Essays”—about essays you should read but probably haven’t. Jess Swoboda and Zach Fine talk to the critic Christian Lorentzen about George Trow’s “Within the Context of No Context,” an essay that took up almost an entire issue of the New Yorker in 1980, and they revisit Christian’s cover story from the April 2019 issue of Harper’s, “Like this or Die: The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm”—which was partially inspired by Trow’s essay.