Rather Be Reading: Recent Episodes
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On this episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to Catherine Lacey about Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge.
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On this episode of the podcast, Jess and Zach return to Selected Essays to talk to Ellen Wayland-Smith about Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion,” published in the New Yorker in 2018.
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On this episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to the novelist and English professor Bruce Holsinger about John Williams’s Stoner.
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On this episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to the novelist and cultural critic Joanne McNeil about J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island.
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On the fourth episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to the novelist and short story writer (and Point contributor) Jessi Jezewska Stevens about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
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On the third episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to the novelist Adam Ehrlich Sachs about Flaubert’s final, unfinished novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet.
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On the second episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to Clare Sestanovich, writer and managing editor of the Drift, about Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping.
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On this episode of The Point podcast, Zach Fine takes a break from Selected Essays and Selected Novels to discuss another important, if less literary, topic: American football. Zach is joined by Leif Weatherby, the author of an essay just published this week in The Point about the career of Aaron Rodgers against the backdrop of U.S. empire in decline, as well as Point editors James Duesterberg and Julia Aizuss, to discuss this year’s Super Bowl, why Aaron Rodgers (and all quarterbacks) are so weird, and what drives a man into the realm of violence and conspiracy.
Relevant reading:
- “Permanent Decline: The long, slow end of Aaron Rodgers, the American man, and U.S. empire,” by Leif Weatherby (The Point)
- “Steroids, Baseball, America,” by Jon Baskin (The Point)
- “Biggest Losers,” by Jon Baskin (The Point, Forms of Life)
On this episode—our very first!—of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to novelist (and writer of our 2024 advice column, Higher Gossip) Lillian Fishman about Edith Wharton’s novel Age of Innocence.
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On this bonus episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov about their new anthology of the best of n+1’s second decade, The Intellectual Situation.
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On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to George Scialabba about Michael Walzer’s "In Defense of Equality," first published in Dissent in 1973.
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On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to writer and literary critic Emily Ogden about Elizabeth Hardwick’s "Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Berenson," first published in Partisan Review in 1960.
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On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Julian Lucas about his essay “Welcome to Armageddon,” published in Cabinet in 2017, and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” which was written in 1951.
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On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Greg Jackson about
his essay “Within the Pretense of No Pretense,” published in issue 31 ofThe Point, and Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics,” first published in 1967 in the New Yorker.
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On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Michael Clune about
his 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.
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On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Jennifer Wilson about
her 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
On this episode of The Point podcast, Jon Baskin talks to a fellow long-suffering Cavellian: the writer and New Left Review editor Lola Seaton. Lola joins us to discuss her essay for issue 28 of The Point, “The Sound Makes All the Difference,” on her relationship to Stanley Cavell’s unmistakable and infectious—if sometimes infuriating—writing style.
Timestamps:
- Literature as an act of communication. (5:46)
- Cavell’s reading of King Lear and its deep insight about parental bribery (7:40)
- How Cavell found his vocation in philosophy (13:11)
- “Philosophy is a willingness to think undistractedly about the things people can’t help thinking about.” (18:00)
- The “essential optimism” of Cavell’s approach to ordinary language philosophy (20:12)
- The depth of convention (21:48)
- Is there a tension between Cavell’s democratic aspirations and his ornate writing style? (25:08)
- The anxiety of authenticity: “For philosophy to begin, you have to be perturbed by the question you’re taking up.” (34:17)
- Where to start if you’re new to reading Cavell (42:56)
- Cavell’s modernism (47:23)
- Autofiction and autophilosophy (54:03)
- Cavell and politics (1:03:17)
Relevant reading:
- “The Sound Makes All the Difference” by Lola Seaton (Issue 28 of The Point)
The Point podcast is back after a long hiatus with an episode about the 2022 midterms. Point editors Jon Baskin and Joey Keegin are joined by the journalist and native Ohioan James Pogue to debrief two key elections—JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. What will Vance's victory—and Master's defeat—mean for the National Conservative movement that has embraced them? Jon, James and Joey talk about the emerging fissures in the conservative coalition: In the fight to claim the mantle of Trumpism without Trump, will it be the NatCons or the "chaos agents" that will win out? Where will the GOP go from here? And what lessons, if any, can Democrats take from the latest election cycle and all of this ferment on the right?
Relevant reading:
- “Where Dreams Come True: The national conservatives go to Orlando” by Joey Keegin (The Point)
- “Inside the New Right, where Peter Thiel Is Putting His Big Bets” by James Pogue (Vanity Fair)
- “Going Back to Cincinnati” by James Pogue (American Conservative)
- “Academia’s Holy Warriors” by Jon Baskin (The Chronicle Review)
- “Among the Reality Entrepreneurs” by James Duesterberg (The Point)
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, Jon and Rachel talk to literary critic Ryan Ruby (author of “Resisting Oblivion” in issue 25) and critic and Point editor Becca Rothfeld (author of “Sanctimony Literature” in Liberties) for a discussion about the political novel today.
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 discrimination in their fiction? Do they have a moral responsibility to speak out against oppression and abuses of power? What makes a political novel good? Now, a year after Trump was voted out of office, have we learned anything about the role the novel ought to play in turbulent times? In addition to these timely issues, the conversation also covers larger questions that have survived the Trump mind warp: about the relationship between politics and art, the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature, and how novels memorialize the past.
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, Rachel, Jon and Joey are joined by Michelle Taylor and Daniel Silver to discuss their essays in issue 24.Essays discussed in this episode:“The Logic of the Like” by Daniel Silver: https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-logic-of-the-like/“No One Is Talking About This” by Michelle Taylor: https://thepointmag.com/criticism/no-one-is-talking-about-this/Subscribe to The Point to read this issue and more: http://thepointmag.com/subscribe
On Episode 3 of Rather Be Reading, Anastasia Berg interviews Andrea Long Chu about her debut essay in n+1 “On Liking Women” and the problem with trying to get our desires to conform to our political principles (1:03). Then Rachel Rosenfelt, the founding editor of the New Inquiry and new publisher of the New Republic, joins us to talk about the history of Occupy at leftist magazines and the future of the New Republic (26:24). Finally, we call up Jon’s mom for her two cents on Doris Lessing, sexist bosses and Bernie bros (36:59).Editors: Jon Baskin, Anastasia Berg & Rachel WisemanGuests: Andrea Long Chu, Rachel Rosenfelt & Judy WiseRelevant Sources:- “On Liking Women” by Andrea Long Chu in n+1: nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/- “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” by Amia Srinivasan in the LRB:https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex- “Lesbianism or Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” by Robin Morgan, 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference address:http://www.onearchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Lesbianism-and-Feminism-Synonyms-or-Contradictions-by-Robin-Morgan-April-14-1973.pdf- “Tired of Winning” by Jon Baskin in The Point:thepointmag.com/2018/politics/tired-of-winning- “Occupy a Bank” by Sarah Leonard in the New Inquiry:thenewinquiry.com/occupy-a-bank/- “Switching Off” by Rachel Wiseman in The Point:thepointmag.com/2018/examined-life/switching-off- “Leaving Herland” by Nora Caplan-Bricker in The Point:thepointmag.com/2018/politics/leaving-herland+ the rest of our new intellectuals symposium:https://thepointmag.com/point_symposia/what-are-intellectuals-for
On Episode 2 of Rather Be Reading, The Point podcast, we discuss the #MeToo social media campaign, shitty media men, and moral education with Becca Rothfeld and Jennifer Frey (00:54). For Charitable Reading, Jon Baskin talks to literary critic Nicholas Dames about Franco Moretti and the so-called "digital humanities bust" (27:22). Plus, we call up comedian David Heti to get his opinion on Larry David's controversial SNL monologue—and hear his latest Holocaust jokes (44:17).Editors: Jon Baskin, Anastasia Berg & Rachel WisemanGuests: Jennifer Frey, Becca Rothfeld, Nicholas Dames, David HetiRelevant Sources:- "The Fratty Wolf in Your Grandmother's Clothing" by Becca Rothfeld, in the Baffler. thebaffler.com/latest/fratty-wolf- "Can Feminist Scholarship Stop Sexism?" by Becca Rothfeld, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. www.chronicle.com/article/Can-Femi…ship-Stop/240428- "The Digital Humanities Bust" by Timothy Brennan, in the Chronicle Review. www.chronicle.com/article/The-Digi…ties-Bust/241424- "Letter on the New Humanities" by the Editors, in The Point. thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/the-new-humanities- "System Reboot" by Justin Evans, in The Point. thepointmag.com/2016/criticism/system-reboot- "Things Don't Make Sense" by Sheila Heti & David Heti, in The Point. https://thepointmag.com/2017/dialogue/things-dont-make-sense-conversation-comedy-sheila-heti-david-heti
Is there such a thing as a conservative intellectual? In the inaugural episode of Rather Be Reading, The Point Magazine podcast, we discuss the "What Happened to the Public Intellectual?" panel that we attended during the Brooklyn Book Festival and why there is resistance to the notion that conservative intellectuals exist. Plus, a "Charitable Reading" segment on why lefties despise David Brooks (featuring famous Brooks hater Jake Bittle) and a bit where we check in with Jon's mom.Editors: Jon Baskin, Anastasia Berg & Rachel WisemanGuests: Jake Bittle, Judy Wise