The Best of The Point Magazine

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.

When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption …

This is part of a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. Racism doesn’t tend to make me angry. You might […]

This is the final column in a four-part series by Helena de Bres on academic philosophy and the meaning of life.

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

A few days after my youngest brother died last August, I started to think about Lazarus all the time.

Unlike the schlockier disaster porn that precedes it, the technical disaster movie depicts a real or realistic catastrophe that is in principle avoidable.

This is the third column in a four-part series by Helena de Bres on academic philosophy and the meaning of life, published weekly.

What does it mean for a number to exist? In the philosophy of mathematics, there are two general camps when it comes to numbers: there are the Platonists—or the “realists”—who think numbers somehow…

We all responded to the events of 2020 in our own ways. Like many others, I spent large parts of my days searching through news […]

Augustine’s relationship to slavery—and sex—tells us much about how the ideal of freedom emerged alongside human bondage.

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…