The Point Podcast

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Siri Hustvedt joins us to discuss Simone Weil’s “Human Personality” and her own essay “Scapegoat,” which appears in her recent collection Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021).

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Carina del Valle Schorske joins us to discuss Samuel Delany's 1996 essay “Times Square Blue” and her 2019 essay “The Ladder Up: A Restless History of Washington Heights,” which was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review. (For more on Delany, check out this recent profile  in the New Yorker by Julian Lucas.)

On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Leo Robson and Rosa Lyster join us to discuss two essays by Martin Amis: “In Praise of Pritchett,” which appeared in the London Review of Books in 1980, and “The American Eagle,” an essay about Saul Bellow published in The Atlantic in 1995.

On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Leslie Jamison joins us to discuss Charles D’Ambrosio’s 2002 essay “Documents” and her essay “The Empathy Exams,” which appeared in The Believer in 2014 and was the title of her first collection.

On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Jess Swoboda and Zach Fine talk to the writer Adam Shatz about James Baldwin's essay “Alas, Poor Richard” (1961), a eulogy of sorts for Richard Wright, and Adam's new book, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso 2023), which gathers a series of intellectual portraits of great thinkers and writers such as Wright, Claude-Levi Strauss, Chester Himes, Jacques Derrida, Fouad Ajami and Edward Said.

On this bonus episode of “Selected Essays,” Merve Emre and Tobi Haslett discuss the great American essayists Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag. Merve and Tobi revisit their own essays about Hardwick and Sontag—published in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker—and consider why it’s hard to imagine critics like them existing today.  For more where that came from, check out Jess’s interview with Tobi Haslett from last year and Merve’s pieces for The Point. You can also order On Women, a new collection of Susan Sontag’s writings, with an introduction by Merve. 

On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Jess Swoboda and Zach Fine talk to the writer Anne Fadiman about Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” (1942) and Anne’s essay from the April 2023 issue of Harper’s, “Frog”—a eulogy of sorts for the family frog, Bunky, which was partially inspired by Woolf’s meditation on a moth fluttering back and forth across a window pane. 

On this episode of The Point Podcast, Jonny Thakkar talks to our resident anatomist of the global political zeitgeist: Anton Jäger, a historian of political thought at the Catholic University of Leuven. Anton joins us to discuss his essay for issue 29, “Everything Is Hyperpolitical,” an ambitious attempt at historicizing our hyperpolitical present, which he diagnoses as the culmination of a trajectory from mass politics to post-politics.Hyperpolitics beyond the intuitive definition (3:20)The relation between post-politics and technocracy (13:28)“I think I stumbled onto it, and not in a particularly elegant way”: inventing hyperpolitics and why we need it (17:20)The challenges of generalization, and how the U.S. ended up in a hyperpolitical predicament without a history of European-style mass politics (23:13)Is the phenomenology of hyperpolitics just the phenomenology of social media? (38:47)The division between politics and policy, and the difference between political will and political demands (47:11)International relations and alternative hyperpolitical paradigms (51:22)Culture as political unconscious: the benefits of the Adam Curtis approach (59:48)

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.

Lola Seaton, a writer and editor at the New Left Review, dives into the unique writing style of Stanley Cavell, exploring how his philosophical insights foster human connection. She discusses Cavell's reading of 'King Lear' and its themes of love and responsibility. The conversation highlights the tension between his ornate prose and democratic aspirations, while also examining the importance of ordinary language in philosophical thought. Seaton provides tips for beginners wanting to engage with Cavell’s work and emphasizes the role of authenticity in literature and philosophy.