Jon Baskin @BaskinJon Twitter profile

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

6 years

video games have really changed since I was a kid

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Last Seen Profiles

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

"I haven't read this and neither should you" is a genre I admit I did not see catching on with humanities professors

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

I wrote about DFW’s late fiction, his struggle to find a larger cause worth committing to, and our nihilism-to-sincerity seesaw

David Foster Wallace’s Final Attempt to Make Art Moral

In a late work, Wallace captured the appeal—and the impossibility—of the literature that he hoped to create.

www.newyorker.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

I wrote about Riefenstahl, Malick, Knausgaard, and the possibility of an antifascist aesthetic for @NYRDaily

The Unbearable: Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic | Jon Baskin

Leni Riefenstahl’s film communicates the pleasure the people experienced—how “good” it felt to them, as Knausgaard puts it—at having escaped the quotidian chaos of their shabby republic and their...

www.nybooks.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 months

The disdain for / distrust of genius might be the single thing I felt most alienated by when I first got into literary studies. I literally couldn't understand why we were there if not to read and talk about geniuses.

CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN

@xlorentzen

2 months

Barkan: 'The War on Genius'

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

8 months

Yes, I am aware that the @nytimes has started an opinion blog called The Point. Yes, it is annoying.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

@GDess what’s strange about this passage is now noncommittal it is. When it starts you think she is going to endorse the move beyond the amoral “is it interesting?” but then she describes what succeeds it in a voice that makes it sound even shallower

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

I wrote about Ben Lerner, my traumatic memories of literary studies in college, and the hatred of literature in the editorial for our new issue on art and experience (subscribe today!)

On the Hatred of Literature | The Point Magazine

The hatred of literature, though it remains almost unheard of among the general reading public, has become the default mode in the upper reaches of our literary culture.

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

Great new issue of @Harpers out today, beginning with @laurenoyler "getting paid about 50 percent more than DFW" for a cruise ship essay that is, imo, at least 50% better than his

I Really Didn’t Want to Go, by Lauren Oyler

On the Goop cruise

harpers.org

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

“We tried, and we failed, to save the world from our parents. And because we failed, we have been written out of history.” Been waiting a long time for someone to write this article

My Generation, by Justin E. H. Smith

Anthem for a forgotten cohort

harpers.org

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

here’s something that I learned from this article passes for “education”

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 months

@moonbeeaam it has a lot to do with the style and the deliberate attempt to create an impression of spontaneity and "unartiness." The David Shields book Reality Hunger, as annoying as it is in some ways, is extremely helpful on this (I got the term from him).

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

"We are giving young people the idea that the unhappiness that they have about their relationships is a matter to be taken up with the authorities.” @wesyang on Jeannie Suk Gerson and the "bureaucratization of intimate life":

The Revolt of the Feminist Law Profs

Jeannie Suk Gersen and the fight to save Title IX from itself.

www.chronicle.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

much of my frustration w reading Rooney can be summed up by the fact it’s not clear to me whether she knows this is satire

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

"Yale’s renowned expert on 'the good life,' would, without hesitation, lie motionless and alone inside of this machine for the rest of her days." @jennfrey on happiness at Yale: shocking in the best ways

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

Becca is doing things I did not know could be done in a newspaper column about books

Review | Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach, ex-friends, now have rival books

Calloway’s self-published “Scammer” and Beach’s “Adult Drama” arrive on the same week, four years after Beach’s viral essay about the breakup of their friendship.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

truest thing that has been said in a Chotiner interview to date

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

there's a certain group of Gen X middlebrow writers, almost all white and male, who once ran blogs with names like "Rogue" and whose sole occupation is now to extol the virtues of fact checking, censorship, and moralistic mob justice on Twitter. What happened to these people?

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

@dnbrgr 'arguments about wokeness are so far down my list of concerns that here is a 15 tweet thread on a short column in NY Mag that goes out of its way to misrepresent the column and defame its author'

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

For the @ChronicleReview I wrote about the reception of "Why Liberalism Failed" the non-liberal right, and what's being proposed to follow the "dead consensus":

Academia’s Holy Warriors

How a network of Catholic intellectuals is making the case against liberalism.

www.chronicle.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

Excited to finally share the essays from a packed issue 27 of @the_point_mag . I'll follow with a thread introducing them but wanted to start by encouraging you, if you like the work we do and want to make sure it continues, to subscribe to the magazine:

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

so the point of this Atlantic article is that while it's hard breaking up your family at least your children can have a model of how to care about nobody besides themselves?

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

6 months

Always amazed to come on here and see people I otherwise respect jumping (with both feet!) onto an abject pile-on. What is the point? Is it just to feel a part of things or do people really think they have a distinctive way of registering their agreement that “this is bad”?

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

I wrote a book about David Foster Wallace, philosophy, and why it's important to know the difference between therapy and theory. If you're in Chicago, come hear me discuss it with @BenWKJ at @SeminaryCoop this Friday night:

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

@thomaschattwill my favorite part is how Dunn acts like he’s thankful for this generous act of service

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 months

Lillian Fishman explores the “divide between the hobbyists and the mystics” on sex:

Is Sex Fun? | The Point Magazine

Q: My girlfriend and I have always had what I’ve considered a healthy (albeit “plain”) sexual dynamic—we fuck regularly, make each other come in various […]

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

10 months

At a time when many humanities institutions are contracting, @the_point_mag continues to grow and branch out into new activities, including our @publicthinking_ initiative. If you value this work, we hope you’ll consider making a donation

Donate to The Point | The Point Magazine

Since it was founded in 2009, The Point has remained faithful to the Socratic idea that philosophy is not just a rarefied activity for scholars and […]

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 months

Was the Knausgaard vote just too dispersed?

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

"The frustration of the professoriate has been redirected inward. We shout at each other rather than speak to the public." John Guillory in the new "Criticism in Public"

Criticism in Public: An interview with John Guillory

John Guillory’s forthcoming book Professing Criticism will force professors to rethink graduate education and challenge literary scholars to confront the paradoxes inherent to the discipline.

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

grateful for this incisive political analysis from the New Yorker: ‘if Tim Ryan wins, it will prove that focusing on jobs is xenophobic’

The New Yorker

@NewYorker

2 years

Ohio’s Democratic candidate for Senate, Tim Ryan, has put forth an economic platform that is pro-union, manufacturing nostalgic, nationalistic, and Sinophobic, trying to appeal to Republicans and independents as much as Democrats, @etammykim writes.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

cannot believe this is real

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

@SamuelLoncar Pretending to read something is highly respectable compared to bragging about not reading it.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

"Whom are these stories for?" @ebruenig asks an important question

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

I wrote about Charlie Kaufman, whose art demonstrates both the promise and peril of Gen X self-consciousness, for @pageturner

Can Charlie Kaufman Get Out of His Head?

Kaufman became famous writing self-conscious films in a self-conscious time. In his début novel, he reminds us of the triumphs—and blind spots—of a generation.

www.newyorker.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 months

"Rose took her interlocutors’ errors to reflect a more general drive to make politics 'safe'—safe not so much from physical danger as from becoming complicit in violence or oppression." Maya Krishnan on the philosophy of Gillian Rose

The Risk of the Universal | The Point Magazine

“I may die before my time.” The English philosopher Gillian Rose (1947-1995) opened one of her final lectures with these words.

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

This week on the @Harpers podcast, I talked to Adam Kirsch about Zadie Smith's "The Fraud," autofiction, the two waves of Gen X fiction, and the different ways that writers born in 70s have dealt with the millennial challenge

The Gen X Novel, by Adam Kirsch, Christopher Beha

Reading Zadie Smith’s 'The Fraud' as Gen X literature

harpers.org

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

I don’t understand what is at stake in trying to decide whether Didion’s best writing was progressive or conservative

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

"If philosophy is going to “change anyone’s life,” as its popularizers are fond of claiming it can do, then the people writing it must be willing to be changed by the people reading it." Becca in @yalereview

Becca Rothfeld: "In the Shallows"

Why do public intellectuals condescend to their readers?

yalereview.org

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

I totally disagree with your argument AND I'm mad you didn't cite me while making it is an inventive combo of complaints even for academics

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

10 months

In the new @Harpers , @togglecoat reads Roth in Newark. It’s an essay that, in a remarkable tribute to its subject, refuses to “kill its engine peacefully at the border between fiction and reality”

Your Mind’s in the Hands of Everything, by Hannah Gold

Letting go of Philip Roth

harpers.org

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

the person who would have most appreciated this dynamic is the author of Infinite Jest

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

Just in time! Was really getting worried we were all going to be able to enjoy something together without having to be ashamed of ourselves.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

"How the Harvard Law School faculty came to be seen as out on a perilous limb for defending 'the most basic principles we teach' is part of the submerged history of our time." @wesyang 's new column, on Title IX and the "wider shift" in liberalism:

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

“Artificially engineered peak experiences have long been known to induce extreme conformity.” This is a fascinating read (tks @GutkinLen )

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

I’m of the ‘is it interesting?’ generation but think there are more, um, interesting ways of describing this transition than attributing it to social media. Amoralism produces its own backlash just as hypermoralism does.

@gdess

@GDess

2 years

Zadie Smith

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

"Becoming a citizen doesn’t happen overnight. Like living with war, it’s slowly becoming the new normal." @RihamKousa , who became a German citizen this week (!), wrote movingly about growing up stateless for our nation states symposium last year

Returning to Nowhere | The Point Magazine

The passport, certainly, cannot settle the seemingly simple question: Where do I come from? Maybe it is Syria and Palestine; maybe neither. Sometimes I identify with what a German immigration officer...

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

Why do people care what Pinker says about anything? Genuine question.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 months

This is the weirdest assumption of this whole discourse to me. What is the evidence that naming it has ever made any difference whatsoever?

Timothy Snyder

@TimothyDSnyder

4 months

6/11. Once named, fascism can be defeated. Indeed, once named it can be easily defeated.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

interesting essay that suggests how burnout, like so much of the vocabulary we seem to have inherited from the 1970s, filters the response to substantive socioeconomic developments through a fundamentally therapeutic idiom

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

this piece on academia and the art world made me wonder: Is there any conversation about the role of aesthetic experience in art history depts right now that is comparable to what's happening in literary studies? if so, where?

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

Very excited for this conversation and have already promised Ryan we will work out the relationship between fiction and political memory. After that Becca will explain moral realism once and for all. Don’t miss it!

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

Still remember when grown ups began proudly advertising how much they liked reading Harry Potter. In retrospect this was not only annoying but also an important cultural moment.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

I feel about Franzen the way some people say they feel about W.--now that he's out of power all this stuff I used to find intolerable just seems earnest and endearing

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

There is vastly more good writing about books today than at any time I can remember growing up

Dustin Illingworth

@ddillingworth

3 years

LRB, Sidecar, Bookforum, NYRB, The Nation, The Baffler, The Point, Jewish Currents, Poetry. I sympathize with the financial precarity associated with the critic, but there is some really remarkable work being written. (Also: nothing wrong with a good CTR.)

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

The most convincing thing I’ve read yet on how to think about Tár’s breaks with reality:

Tár on Tár | The Point Magazine

Critical reactions to Tár—the riveting, haunting tour de force that marks Todd Field’s return to directing—may raise the suspicions of those weary of the prevailing […]

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

Published my first essay ever on literature with Bookforum in 2006, on Harold Brodkey. Will always be grateful to Albert Mobilio for his patience and guidance with a totally inexperienced writer, something their editors clearly did for countless young critics.

Bookforum Magazine

@bookforum

2 years

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

8 months

it's true, a problem I have a lot of days is that I don't hear enough from NYT columnists and ed board members

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

6 years

just keep re-reading this and trying to imagine a humanities academic suggesting such a thing today

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

loved talking w Jenn Frey about a bunch of our favorite things (Bloom, Murdoch, DFW, Cavell, morality and fiction), then thought if I really pushed it I could maybe get my mom and a few friends from grad school to listen

Sacred and Profane Love

@eudaimoniapod

3 years

#1 was a discussion of David Foster Wallace and philosophical criticism with the editor of @the_point_mag @BaskinJon

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

I regret the timing of our op-ed coming out today because we also have a new issue available, and it says more than any of us could in 1200 words about the positive form we think humanistic engagement can take outside the university.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 months

This is about historians but captures the broader plague of academics who weaponize supposed expertise to make shallow or redundant political points. It's a way of being a "public intellectual" that manages to harm both the public and intellectual life

Resistance Historians Like Heather Cox Richardson Have Bugged Me for Years. Now Everyone Is...

Should Biden drop out? There’s not much in the American past that can tell us.

slate.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

"These films were two Hail Marys for the two fronts of an ailing twentieth-century mass culture: prestige drama and bubblegum ubiquity, the atom bomb and the plastic doll."

Do You Guys Ever Think About Dying? | The Point Magazine

1. BARBIE VS. OPPIE Barbie was easy. The movie was playing everywhere, and there was no sense that it had to be seen in any […]

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

This beautiful essay reminded me of a friend who always stands up for the weather as conversation topic: "It's fascinating, it affects everybody, and it changes every day!"

Laura Marris

@lauramarris

4 years

It’s a little known fact that Camus worked briefly as a meteorologist. For @the_point_mag I wrote about human barometers, plague clouds, and checking the weather in times of uncertainty. Huge thanks to John Palattella for the lovely edit ☁️

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

8 months

“Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant.” Sam Kriss on America’s court biographer:

Very Ordinary Men | The Point Magazine

I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk.

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

6 years

just another day in the trenches of the culture industry w @rosemarieho_

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

In addition to our "10 most popular" list which is going around I wanted to share a few additional essays from the mag this year that have been very popular in my own head:

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

"By calling the literature I am interested in 'existential,' I mean to indicate its preoccupation with what it is like to be alive here and now." Was an honor working with Toril Moi on this essay on literary criticism and the "existential turn" in fiction

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

Thrilled to introduce this new series on literary scholarship and public criticism, hosted by @JessSwoboda . Check out her first interview with @kjavadizadeh on "difficulty," Elizabeth Bishop, the role of style in academic writing--and much more!

Jessica Swoboda

@JessSwoboda

3 years

@the_point_mag 's "Criticism in Public"--a series of interviews with academics about public writing, academic scholarship & literary criticism--launches today! Check out my interview @kjavadizadeh on what it means to "add to the stock of reality":

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

Had a great time talking to Matt and Dave for the @ConcavityShow about Wallace, Wittgenstein, Cavell and what I mean by calling Wallace's fiction "therapeutic" in my book "Ordinary Unhappiness"

Concavity Show

@ConcavityShow

5 years

In Episode 52, we talk to @BaskinJon , author of the excellent monograph "Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace." Now live on podcasting services of all kinds! #davidfosterwallace #thepaleking #infinitejest

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

7 years

It's true, the best books of 2017 were little magazines:

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

now that I have a real job am devastated to learn opening day is not a national holiday

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

Pls reward @greenlightbklyn for courageously carrying issue 21 in Fort Greene, despite risky anti Lerner / Rooney content

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

6 years

sometimes it can seem like he's just rambling, but the last part of Cavell's Lear essay makes for pretty amazing reading these days

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 months

For the opening letter of the new issue, I wrote about being a father in public—with some help from Knausgaard of course

The Point Magazine

@the_point_mag

4 months

Issue 32 has already begun arriving in subscribers’ mailboxes, and will be online soon. But if you want to among the first to read it, you’ll have to subscribe:

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

appreciated so many things about this essay but especially Merve's emphasis on the book's pleasures as opposed to its "difficulty"

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

"The comedic engine, for Chase, was this: What if things had become so selfish and narcissistic in America that even the mob couldn’t take it?" This is so good

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

"Are you game? she seems to ask. Or are you the type to flinch from reality?" @parul_sehgal on Dasa Drndic, whose work is excerpted in the next issue of @the_point_mag , as part of our first Literature section:

In Gory, Majestic Fiction, a Hard Look at the Holocaust’s Stubborn Silences (Published 2019)

The novels of Dasa Drndic, a Croatian writer who died in 2018 at 71, are contraptions that produce panic, pity and exhilaration in her readers.

www.nytimes.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

it's amazing the audience @jennfrey has built for @eudaimoniapod —a podcast where writers and academics simply speak in depth about their favorite books!—and it's one of the things that makes me optimistic about the future of the humanities outside of universities

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 months

Maybe biased but I’ve learned more about writing listening to this series than at any time since high school. I think the key is that the conversations never artificially separate insights about “craft” (for lack of a less irritating word) from discussion of content and ideas.

The Point Magazine

@the_point_mag

5 months

On the new episode of Selected Essays, @JessSwoboda and Zach Fine talk to Michael Clune about Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and how to write literature that captures the rhythm of consciousness:

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

One of the background themes of @Wesyang ’s @ChronicleReview essay is the courage or defiance it now takes to stand up for what very recently were considered self-evident moral and legal principles.

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

What I learned from Twitter this morning: the only thing standing in the way of true democracy is voters

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

“Alternatively, we could conceive of the academy as a high-containment laboratory for ideas, even perilous ideas, which might enable us to understand and re-evaluate conceptions of human life that are so strange to us that they appear immoral.”

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

the best political essay of the year, written in 3 wks under constant barrage via Slack from editors eager to "promote the issue before people go offline for the holidays" (we needn't have worried)

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

8 years

Always so proud to see our former @the_point_mag interns in the news:

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

"Like a bemused Fox News anchor, Agamben concludes that travel bans, canceling public and private events, and enforcing quarantine are all simply 'disproportionate'" @a_n_a_berg updates us on the senescence of the postmodernists

Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness

The Italian philosopher’s interventions are symptomatic of theory’s collapse into paranoia.

www.chronicle.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

9 months

@the_point_mag ’s most popular essays of 2023: the personal, the political, and everything in between

Top Articles of 2023 | The Point Magazine

As 2023 comes to a close, we’re proud to present our most-read web pieces of the year, listed below in reverse order. If you enjoy […]

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

promises to leave you feeling apathetic, alienated, and inspired

Elena Saavedra Buckley

@elenasb_

1 year

Harper’s is hosting this!

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

“All around me, from the apartments nearby and the hundreds of people watching the match below me, were the sounds of the game. I couldn't see it, but I could hear it.” @_Zeets captures the agony and the anxiety of watching the final

The World Cup belongs to Lionel Messi

When Argentina were crowned World Cup champions, there was no bigger proof of Messi's impact that the entire world seemed to celebrate with him.

www.espn.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

Having studied the "ancient quarrel" between art and politics for awhile now, a lot of the arguments are pretty well established. But in the later parts of this essay @_ryanruby_ advances into what seems--to me at least--to be genuinely new territory

Resisting Oblivion | The Point Magazine

To be an American in Europe is to live in the future of events, but in the past of news. On the morning of November […]

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

Sad to hear of the passing of Dave Hickey, who I began reading thanks to this piece by @dan_oppenheimer . Hickey fought his whole career to save American art from Puritans of all kinds

Simple Hearts | The Point Magazine

Much of what Dave taught me had to do with the sympathy and intelligence he applied to varieties of experience that that were alien to me, and that I might otherwise have dismissed as too low to take...

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

3 years

"If you tried to understand museums by sitting outside and studying the demographics of who enters and exits, you would be missing something very important about what museums are for." For the symposium, @AgnesCallard on the "real" college scandal

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

Expanding our imagination about the social novel AND a defense of the mowing scenes in Anna Karenina, all in one post! From @blgtylr

anna karenina is a negro spiritual

the social novel, negro spirituals, etc.

blgtylr.substack.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

wonder if when they are done teaching citational ethics professors have any time left to teach their students how to write?

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

2 years

For @readliberties , I wrote about Sheila Heti's defense of aesthetic values during a period of great ambivalence about art

Sheila Heti and The Fight for Art - Liberties

On the fourth page of Pure Colour, the fourth and most recent novel by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, it is proposed that there are three kinds of beings on the face of the earth. They are each a...

libertiesjournal.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

Excited to present our top ten most read print articles of the year today, but also wanted to take the chance to highlight some other pieces I was proud to work on and publish this year:

The Point Magazine

@the_point_mag

5 years

As 2019 ends, here are some of the articles that helped us reach new highs in readership and engagement this year. Featuring @AgnesCallard , @JMColony , @jmhamburger , @storyshaped , @apcbapcb , @BenWKJ , and the magazine's own @rachelcwiseman and @a_n_a_berg

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

1 year

"Smith’s precocious success can make it easy to think of her as a contemporary of Wallace and Wurtzel. In fact she was born two years before Batuman, and her sensibility is connected to her generational predicament." Adam Kirsch on The Fraud as Gen X novel

Come as You Are, by Adam Kirsch

On Zadie Smith and the Gen X novel

harpers.org

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

The practical result of a Hegelian reading of Antigone is a "fatalism so vacuous that an audience made up of Nazis and resistance fighters can both give the play a standing ovation, which actually happened at a performance in occupied Paris in 1944."

The Problem of Force | The Point Magazine

At the heart of the issues of both police violence and our forever wars is a moral framework which seems perpetually to link “justice” with death.

thepointmag.com

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

7 years

My piece on @samuelmoyn , and his argument that "realistic" liberalism is "not enough":

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

4 years

no one who reads the letter naïvely would understand the vehemence of the response to it. But one of the axiomatic facts of our culture right now is that no one should read anything naïvely

The Point Magazine

@the_point_mag

4 years

"The assumption that public intellectual life is mainly about positioning helps explain some peculiar features of our public conversation."

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Jon Baskin

@BaskinJon

5 years

Thanks to everyone who came out Friday night at @SeminaryCoop and especially to @BenWKJ for reminding me what my arguments were at crucial moments. If you didn't make it, I hope you can still find your way to ordinary unhappiness!

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