If we take a look at Simone de Beauvoir’s writing in the 1940s, we will find a series of different notions of otherness, enabling us to have more nuanced discussions of the concept.

The earthquakes on February 6th that killed more than 55,000 people in Turkey and Syria and resulted in $105 billion in damage were among the […]

My acceptance of philosophy as a way of living never transformed into a source of worldly comfort, and the unsettling gap between thinking and living never closed.

Is a classical worldview premised on social balance compatible with the modern politics of working-class emancipation?

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...

Innumerable nothings happen in the dim, watery fjord lands of Jon Fosse’s novels and plays. In the novella Aliss at the Fire, a woman named […]

In the early years of our century I ran across the name of Stuart Hall, though I don’t remember where. I came to him by […]

As 2021 comes to a close, we’re proud to present our top-ten most-read essays of the year, listed below in reverse order. If you enjoy […]

“What Is X?” has been described as “a cross between a Platonic dialogue and ‘The Price Is Right.’” It combines dialectical inquiry of the sort perfected by Socrates and his interlocutors with a...

I had gone to volunteer at the gay history archive in Cologne because I was going insane.

On the evening of Thursday, August 10, 2023, the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics (WLLL) at West Virginia University, where I teach Russian, […]

A recent article by Nathan Heller in the New Yorker paints a rather bleak picture of a higher-education landscape in which the humanities are eclipsed […]

Tommie Shelby on MLK as philosophical thinker

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

What’s beneath “What is America for?” is: Why do we need the nation form?

This conversation first appeared on Rather Be Reading, The Point podcast.

Is there any way to intervene usefully or meaningfully in public debate—in what extremely online Twitter users call, with gleeful irony, the “discourse”?

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....

How could Habermas provoke so much outrage by arguing in such a deliberative way?

When Augustine of Hippo, the venerable philosopher and bishop, first used religio Christiana in his legendary opus The City of God, he was unhappy with the phrase.

I’ve taught the ethics of technology for thirty years. When introducing the discipline to students, we tend to start with its origin story in the […]

The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 24.

When Augustine of Hippo, the venerable philosopher and bishop, first used religio Christiana in his legendary opus The City of God, he was unhappy with the phrase.

This is the third in a series of columns on political life by James Duesterberg; read more here. On Monday, May 25th, Memorial Day, George Floyd, […]

There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art; I am going to propose a very simple one.

A few years ago, a close friend of mine was working on a piece about Jim Jones, who I only knew about at the time from the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid.” She outlined the basic beats of the Jonestown...

One of the wonders of modern academia is that the ideal of workplace democracy should be so prevalent among people who regularly endure faculty meetings. […]

When I was a little girl, I hid in church.

In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all.

Before the 1970s, the word “parent” was commonly used only as a noun; since that time, American parents have roughly doubled the amount of time they spend parenting, and each generation since seems...

The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 27. To get the issue delivered straight to your door, subscribe […]

The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 29.

Time seems to have come to a halt. Ennui builds—and yet, the stillness is rife with threat.

Afterthoughts is a discussion series from The Point where our editors talk to writers and readers about new issues of the magazine. On this episode, a recording of a Zoom event held on November 1st,...

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....

What is complaint, and what would it mean to see it as “infallible”?

The restless pursuit of pleasure and excitement is often an attempt to divert ourselves from our own misery. The monastic life is all about drawing back from that diversion—entering into a silence...

Matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, or so says modern physics. The subatomic substrate that adds up to the eyes scanning these words, […]

This is the first column in the fourth round of Reading Room, a collective column on reading and life. In each round, the contributors respond […]

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...

Tommie Shelby on MLK as philosophical thinker

Our mayor has made threats to us, to me, to my board. What he’s saying is that he doesn’t want certain types of materials brought into the library, and if the board cannot give him the policy he...

The political significance of the novel was discussed with anguished urgency during the Trump years: Should writers call attention to present forms of injustice and […]

Tejumola Olaniyan was a titan in the world of African literary and cultural studies.

This is the inaugural column in Reading Room, a biweekly collective column on reading and life. The column will go in rounds, with the four […]

“Attunement” was a catchword with the first-year students from the University of Virginia who decided to spend the semester abroad in the fall of 2019. […]

We can show that another world is possible by building it in the spaces available, and then pushing against the state to expand those spaces. … And since democracy is such a core American value—both...

Should we care about animal liberation?

As 2021 comes to a close, we’re proud to present our top-ten most-read essays of the year, listed below in reverse order. If you enjoy […]

This conversation first appeared on Rather Be Reading, The Point podcast.

When I was a little girl, I hid in church.

Portis is a comedian of the highest order, but he is finally—as all comedians must be—a moral philosopher.

This is the fourth in a series of columns on political life by James Duesterberg; read more here. The good thing about movies is that […]

Last October, the Food and Drug Administration announced a shortage of the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder medication Adderall, leaving millions who are prescribed the drug scrambling to […]

Pomona College exists in a consortium of four other private liberal arts colleges in Southern California. It was the first West Coast school to order […]

This conversation first appeared on Rather Be Reading, The Point podcast.

Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been an ongoing quarrel over the definition of mental health: Are disorders like depression, OCD, or schizophrenia biologically determined or are they...

No symposium about what college is for would be complete without the perspectives of those for whom the question is most immediate: college students. This […]

We seem to be less interested in either of these games than in exploring the connection between them—or rather, the philosophical question to which that connection points.