The Point Magazine

It went on long enough that the crowd curdled and its cheers turned sarcastic. The post The Perfect Game appeared first on The Point Magazine.

“I felt the need to tell my story, and to do so in public, where I’m held accountable by the moral gaze of another person—but at the same time not to reduce it, or simplify it.” The post Rejecting Enlightenment appeared first on The Point Magazine.

The End of History and the Last Man is famously talked about more than it is read; as a teenager, however, I did not know this, so after seeing it referenced on multiple blogs, I assumed I had to trudge through the thing. The post Flowers for Frank appeared first on The Point Magazine.

On a dark, gray day in October 2025, the first dozen attendees of the Effective Altruism Global conference make their way to the Sheraton Hotel just north of Times Square in New York City. The post Getting Good appeared first on The Point Magazine.

The problem with Backrooms—like much of the online content that inspired it—is less that it relies too much on vibe and more that it fails to understand what makes that vibe interesting in the first place. The post After the Sublime appeared first on The Point Magazine.

I would like to reflect on the responsibilities of academics like myself in cases like this one, and to suggest that, if we hope to sustain human bonds or a world of shared value, clear thinking is the only way to do so. The post Internal Goods appeared first on The Point Magazine.

As the public face of Silicon Valley secessionism, Srinivasan’s Network State Conference seemed like a prime window into the techno-capitalist frontier. The post No Country for Tech Bros appeared first on The Point Magazine.

I started seeing “MY HUSBAND IS GAY!” videos in the early 2020s when my TikTok algorithm, with its typical eerie prescience, decided to remind me that I was in a lavender marriage. The post My Lavender Marriage appeared first on The Point Magazine.

Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period in our own society of which it may someday be possible to say that “nothing happened.” The post On Radical Preservation appeared first on The Point Magazine.

My daughter joined her school’s newly formed girls’ wrestling team in the seventh grade. Her first tournament was at a high school in Oak Harbor, […] The post Girls Wrestling appeared first on The Point Magazine.

The last pre-COVID exhibition at the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in downtown New York was titled Paint-It-Yourself. The exhibit, showing new work by Merlin […] The post After the Post-Avant-Garde appeared first on The Point Magazine.

Years ago, I had an intense relationship with a man who was brilliant and deeply interesting to talk to. I didn’t doubt he felt similarly […] The post Student of Desire appeared first on The Point Magazine.

Roughly once a week, in August and early September of 2011, I sat in a semicircle in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park with eighty to a […] The post We Were the 99 Percent appeared first on The Point Magazine.

On November 13, 2024, about fifty people gathered on a corner in West Orange, New Jersey, a quiet suburb an hour’s drive from Manhattan. The […] The post Goodbye, West Orange appeared first on The Point Magazine.

Q. Great—I’d love to help. Do you have a particular story in mind? Q. Fascinating premise—there’s a long tradition of stories about artificial intelligence becoming […] The post The Fifth Syllable appeared first on The Point Magazine.

These scenes have been excerpted from the first act of the play Life Worth Living. Modeled after a trauerspiel, or “mourning play,” it was first performed […] The post Advanced Fiction appeared first on The Point Magazine.

This past January, I traveled to a small town in Wisconsin’s Driftless region, the southwest corner of the state the glaciers missed, to join a […] The post A Vital Education appeared first on The Point Magazine.

Hope being an exotic commodity these days, I try to take it wherever I can get it. One of the few recent times I’ve felt […] The post Art Auctions appeared first on The Point Magazine.

The last thing we should want to do with accounts of mystical or transcendent or contemplative experiences is send them to the taxidermist and mount them for inspection. The post The Stretch of a Soul appeared first on The Point Magazine.

This interview with Carlo Ginzburg, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago. The post Searching for the Unexpected appeared first on The Point Magazine.