To read The Point is to step into an ongoing conversation—one that brings together scholars, journalists, activists, critics, artists and readers in a shared effort to think seriously about the problems of the present. In a media landscape that feels ever more frantic, fragmented and false, we hope you’ve found an alternative here in our pages: the rare chance to sit with surprising, carefully argued essays, discover thinkers new and old, and return to perennial questions about how to live. If so, we hope you’ll consider subscribing or making a contribution today.
This year, The Point published dozens of urgent, searching essays that transcended the news cycle. In the winter, Issue 34—completed in the aftermath of the 2024 election and going to press as Donald Trump began his second term—sought to think through, in real time, how liberal intellectual life, gender politics and the conservative movement are changing. It included Mana Afsari’s “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” our breakout politics essay of the year, which drew record web traffic for the magazine and was soon being passed around and debated well beyond our usual readership. Our summer issue (#35), devoted entirely to the question “What is violence for?,” collected essays, reportage, dialogues and literature on war habits and the American death drive, political terror and resistance, with contributions stretching from Gaza and Germany to our own fractured country on the eve of the Charlie Kirk assassination. Alongside the print magazine, we continued to lay the groundwork for a more humane public conversation through the Program for Public Thinking. We ran two successful summer workshops with college students around the country, hosted lectures on journalism and democracy, put on a conference about the future of literary criticism in and outside the university, and hosted three Live Criticism events with students at UChicago. Online, we expanded our audio offerings with new episodes of The Point Podcast, including the launch of “Selected Novels,” and, notably, started a Substack—in order to cultivate new readers and share some of the lively behind-the-scenes discussions and debates happening among our editors.
For all the magazine’s accomplishments in recent years, it remains a fragile enterprise. The Point is a small literary nonprofit, and is fully reliant on reader support and donations for its survival. That’s why we’re asking for your help as we try to reach our end-of-year fundraising goal. If you learned something from The Point this year, or read something that inspired you, or surprised you, or changed your mind, please take two minutes to subscribe or donate. We can use all the support that we can get—no amount is too small.
