The Point Podcast

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Michael Clune abouthis essay “The Anatomy of Panic,” published in Harper's last May and  recently selected for Best American Essays, and Thomas Nagel’s “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” first published in 1974 in the Philosophical Review.Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50at checkout for 50% off.

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Jennifer Wilson abouther New York Times Book Review essay, “The Love Letters That Spoke of Everything but Love,” and Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device,” first published in 1917.Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50at checkout for 50% off.

On this bonus episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Point editors, Jon Baskin and Rachel Wiseman about two of their favorite essays—Charles Comey's “Against Honeymoons,” and Moeko Fujii’s “Let Them Misunderstand”—and what makes them quintessential Point pieces.

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Apoorva Tadepalli about Maeve Brennan’s “Lost Overtures” and her Electric Lit essay “It’s Okay to Talk to Me When I’m Trying to Read.”

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Sumana Roy about Joseph Brodsky’s “Less Than One” and her Caravan essay “We Are All Mamata Now.” Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50 at checkout for 50% off.

On the new episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach speak with Clare Bucknell about Charles Lamb’s “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers”—surprisingly the first essay a guest has chosen that was written before 1900. In histories of the essay form, from Montaigne forward, you’ll often see Lamb’s name appear as one of the great “familiar” essayists, but he’s read relatively little today. Listen to hear Clare’s  reading of Lamb’s essay and how it shaped her thoughts on the ever-controversial Giacomo Casanova, the focus of her piece in Harper’s, “The Thoughtful Prick.” Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50 at checkout for 50% off.

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Suzy Hansen about her essay, “A Cold War Mind: American and the World,” a chapter from Suzy's book Notes on a Foreign Country, and Octavio Paz’s “The Pachucho and Other Extremes,”  the first part of his 1950 book The Labyrinth of Solitude. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50 at checkout for 50% off.

Jess and Zach go over their favorite moments from the first season of “Selected Essays”—listen in for the highlights and then catch up in time for Season 2.

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Garth Greenwell about his essay “A Moral Education: In Praise of Filth,” which was published in The Yale Review in 2023 and Martha Nussbaum’s "Flawed Crystals: James's The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy," which originally appeared in the journal New Literary History in 1983 and was later collected in her book Love's Knowledge.

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Lauren Oyler about her essay “Desperately Seeking Sebald,” which was published in Harper’s in 2021 and Elif Batuman’s “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy,” which was also published in Harper's in 2009 and then later collected in her book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them as “Who Killed Tolstoy?”

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Ryan Ruby joins us to discuss Susan Sontag’s “Approaching Artaud” and his own essay “Dig It Up Again,” which was written for the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and published last year by Poetry magazine.

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.