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The Point Magazine

The Point is a magazine founded on the suspicion that modern life is worth examining. www.thepointmag.com

  • 41 minutes 22 seconds
    Selected Novels | Catherine Lacey on Evan S. Connell

    On this episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to Catherine Lacey about Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge.

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    4 September 2025, 1:00 pm
  • 36 minutes 24 seconds
    Selected Essays | Ellen Wayland-Smith on Siddhartha Mukherjee

    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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    7 August 2025, 1:00 pm
  • 42 minutes 36 seconds
    Selected Novels | Bruce Holsinger on Stoner

    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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    3 July 2025, 1:00 pm
  • 46 minutes 51 seconds
    Selected Novels | Joanne McNeil on J.G. Ballard

    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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    5 June 2025, 1:00 pm
  • 44 minutes 28 seconds
    Selected Novels | Jessi Jezewska Stevens on Thomas Mann

    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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    1 May 2025, 1:00 pm
  • 49 minutes 42 seconds
    Selected Novels | Adam Ehrlich Sachs on Gustave Flaubert

    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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    27 March 2025, 1:00 pm
  • 47 minutes 17 seconds
    Selected Novels | Clare Sestanovich on Marilynne Robinson

    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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    27 February 2025, 2:00 pm
  • 1 hour 2 minutes
    The decline of Aaron Rodgers (with Leif Weatherby)

    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:

    14 February 2025, 2:00 pm
  • 1 hour 24 seconds
    Selected Novels | Lillian Fishman on Edith Wharton

    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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    30 January 2025, 4:00 pm
  • 52 minutes 54 seconds
    Selected Essays | The n+1 Editors on the Intellectual Situation

    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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    22 October 2024, 1:00 pm
  • 36 minutes 53 seconds
    Selected Essays | George Scialabba on Michael Walzer

    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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    8 August 2024, 1:00 pm
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