A partial transcript of my conversation with Jon Baskin

Why partial, you ask?

Where are his legs? No one knows!

A friend of the newsletter gave me a hard time, recently, for not publishing transcripts of my podcast interviews, given that some people like consuming their interviews that way rather than through their ears.

‘Good idea,’ I thought to myself. ‘I should do that. Ezra Klein does that, and sometimes I prefer to burn through the text version.’

So I set out to lightly edit the transcript of my recent conversation with Jon Baskin, co-founder and co-editor of The Point.

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I started there mostly because it was my most recent interview, but also because it felt like the interview had some independent documentary value. Jon’s a player of some significance, and The Point has played an important role in American intellectual life over the past 10 or 15 years. I could imagine an historian, in a few decades, wanting to reference the interview to get a better sense of American intellectual life in the early 21st century, and a text transcript is simply easier to scan, search, and archive than audio.

So I had AI transcribe the audio. I then did the necessary work of polishing what I got from AI, deleting the filler words and repetitions, re-arranging occasional sentences and paragraphs that were decipherable in the context of a spoken conversation but were confusing in text form, and fixing the AI’s errors.

Then I thought to myself, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why I don’t provide transcripts.’ Because it takes a long time! I’d spent a few hours on it and gotten through less than half of the 17,000+ word interview. I stopped at that point, because I couldn’t justify spending more time on it, given everything else on my plate (full time job, three kids, marriage, other writing commitments, barebones social life). Ezra has a staff to do these things. I have a collaborator who edits the podcast, whom I pay all the proceeds from the paid subscriptions, but otherwise it’s just me.

I mention all this backstory not to make excuses, but because I’m interested in the material conditions of artistic work, and it feels useful on occasion to acknowledge some of the specifics in my case. Right now I don’t depend at all on my freelance writing income. Occasionally a nice check comes in, but never enough to compete with my solid income from working in university communications. I also depend on my wife’s even more solid income as a psychotherapist. I carve out time to produce the newsletter and podcast because I love doing it, and because I think it will bear fruit professionally over the long run, but I run into hard limits when it comes to how much time I can devote to optimizing my distribution strategy.

Looking seven years down the road, to when my state pension vests, my fantasy is that my Substack (and more broadly my freelance writing and podcasting) will be able to help cover the difference between the salary I’d be giving up, by retiring, and the percentage of it (about 55%) that the pension will pay out. At that point, I can imagine really going balls to the wall in terms of pushing out my posts and podcast episodes in various forms on various platforms.

In the meantime, below is a partial transcript of my

Jon Baskin

interview. -Dan

p.s. The

William Deresiewicz

essay that he and I discussed in our recent conversation is now online at Salmagundi. It is (as the kids say) fire.

p.p.s. Friend of EA, and Airmail deputy editor,

Ash Carter

just launched his Substack. I particularly like this post, “Sugar-Pilled,” which connects JFK conspiratorialism to the vibe of the Trump administration.

Master p.s. Jon Baskin wrote a really nice follow-up post to our conversation.

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Daniel Oppenheimer: John Baskin. Welcome to Eminent Americans. You are hereby anointed an eminent American by the power vested in me by the state of Texas.

Jon Baskin: I’m very, very honored, Daniel.

Oppenheimer: We have a lot of things to talk about today. This came out of a back and forth that you and I had, on Substack, about how Substack may affect the relationship between magazines, particularly small magazines, and writers who they might want to recruit to write for them, and whether Substack changes the whole incentive structure of that relationship. Back in the day, when we writers didn’t have any alternative, it was exciting to write for a magazine like yours, but now that we can grow our readership and maybe even grow our paid subscribership on our own, maybe not so much? Before we get into all of that, though, I want to know the origin story of The Point. When did you guys found it and what’s the story behind that?

Baskin: Yeah, it’s funny. I sometimes feel like we only became a real magazine about four years into our existence, maybe even longer, but officially we started in 2009. The three of us who began the magazine, Jonny Thakkar, Etay Zwick and myself, were all graduate students in this quixotic program at the University of Chicago called the Committee on Social Thought, which for people who don’t know about it, is a sort of great books PhD program. That’s my shorthand for it.

In most of the courses, you read one book or one author very carefully. There’s very little secondary literature involved. There’s a sort of presumption of generosity toward that writer and a sense that they have more to teach us than we have to teach them. Those are some of the respects in which it has the sort of great books ethos, although the actual curriculum is much wider than what you might find at St. John’s or a place like that.

Oppenheimer: I have such a romance of the Committee on Social Thought. It’s both that specific kind of experience that you describe and what I imagine it’s like, but then also the people who are faculty. Like isn’t Martha Nussbaum involved? And then maybe Jonathan Lear is involved. So it’s both the faculty and the experience. I honestly can’t remember whether I applied and was rejected or was just sort of defeated in advance and didn’t apply because I knew I wouldn’t get in. But there is an alternative version of my life where I get my PhD from the Committee on Social Thought.

Baskin: So Martha Nussbaum notoriously is not part of it. It was long before I was there, but there was some controversy over whether she would become part of it and she’s not. Jonathan Lear is, and he was one of my favorite professors and still someone I’m close with. Robert Pippin was my advisor. There were also people like Leon Kass and Nathan Tarcov, sort of more old style conservative professors, who were important to me.

Oppenheimer: Was Allan Bloom part of it?

Baskin: Allan Bloom ran it. I don’t know if he ran it right up until Pippin took over, but at some point before Pippin, he was running it. It’s now run by Jonathan Lear’s wife, Gabriel Lear.

Oppenheimer: I’m wondering now if part of my romance came from reading Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. Was it in there?

Baskin: Oh yeah. It was.

Oppenheimer: Okay. So I read that, and really enjoyed that. I actually think that’s an under-appreciated Bellow novel.

Baskin: It’s a great book.

Oppenheimer: Yeah, so maybe that’s where my romance of Social Thought came from.

Baskin: I read Ravelstein the summer I found out I’d gotten accepted to the Committee on Social Thought. I felt it was sort of required reading to prepare. But I’ll just say, you said you have a romance with Social Thought. I mean, I still have a romance with it, and I spent nine years there. It really was a program that exceeded all my expectations of what graduate school could even be. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and maybe we’ll come to this later in the conversation, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s happened to left liberal intellectual life in the time since we started The Point, and it relates to some things we published in the most recent issue about how to revitalize left liberal intellectual life and make it speak to the aspirations of young people again. And I’ve thought a lot about how I actually did have that experience at Social Thought.

I mean, calling it left liberal is a little bit misleading. Part of what makes it so invigorating is it is a really pluralistic space where there are true conservative intellectuals. I’d say it tilted liberal in my time there, but it was an experience of liberal intellectual life that was generous, that was open, that was respectful of the past and of a sense of greatness.

It did not have this sort of superior attitude toward things that had come before us. And I don’t know, that’s something I think a lot about. It definitely was the formative intellectual experience in my life, and it’s very baked in to The Point, to go back to your initial question to the DNA of the point,

Oppenheimer: It also sounds like it didn’t fetishize the great books or Western civilization in a kind of William Bennett way, like it was a truly liberal environment in that sense. There was a spirit of generosity towards the great thinkers and books of the past, but not a deference to them, not a kind of worship of them.

Baskin: No, there was not deference except the deference we felt they were owed, which was close attention. It was a sense that maybe they have something to teach you more than you have to teach them. I also think that one of the things that a true education in that regard does is it shows that the books interrogate one another. So the great books do not pass down to us some body of irrefutable wisdom. What they do is invite us into a conversation about the highest values and the best things, and this conversation is ongoing and the privilege we get is to play a part in it in the present. And I think that The Point was very much born out of conversations we were having after and in between our classes.

And this was in Chicago in 2008, when we started talking about it. This was the time of Barack Obama running his political campaign. There was a sense of excitement. It’s hard to reproduce for young people today just how exciting this moment was for a lot of intellectuals at the time in America.

We were having all these discussions about how these ancient texts, these books about political theory, about art, about culture, how they related to our own time. But because Social Thought is still an academic program, when we went to write about these things, we were still asked to write basically academic papers, scholarly papers in some regard.

And The Point was, in some way, an attempt to take some of the values of Social Thought, the idea that these books could have direct relevance to our lives, that we didn’t need to run them through some disciplinary jargon or set of secondary conversations, that we could put them in direct conversation with our lives and learn something and think better about some of the big questions in our society.

That was sort of the impetus behind the beginning of the magazine.

Oppenheimer: What were your reference points?

Baskin: N+1 was a huge influence on me, personally, less so I’d say on the other two people who began the magazine. But I had lived in New York after college. I’d gone to Brown as an undergrad, which later became a kind of N+1 feeder institution.

I lived in New York for a few years trying to be a writer. I wanted to be a fiction writer, like so many people in my generation, though it was fairly quickly revealed that I didn’t have very much talent at it. But I remember going to the first party that N+1 threw in New York, at this time when everyone was reading Slate and Salon online and thinking magazines are dead, long form journalism is over, and going to this party and seeing 700 young people in this gymnasium on the Lower East Side, reading this kind of ugly, close set, not very artistically laid out, very serious intellectual magazine. And the first few years of that magazine, I think, were an amazing run of writing and thinking that I still return to today.

And also, just in a more prosaic sense, seeing the model that like these four or five guys had where it hadn’t taken a ton of money. They’d been able to just start this magazine and it found an audience. So that was a model for us. We started coming out two times a year, just like they had, and some of the look and feel of it are certainly similar, and were even more similar at the beginning.

So they had a big influence on me. Interestingly, magazines that had had a big influence on N+1, like Partisan Review, Commentary, Politics, were much less front of mind for us, For better or worse. I think we actually had quite a naive sense of the history of little magazines, compared to the founders of N+1, and this became relevant later when we began to occupy a very different space, as the culture sphere became more politicized. The idea that historically a little magazine was essentially a political project, that it was a group of people who had a certain political line and wanted to move the culture in a certain direction politically, which I think they very much inherited from that Partisan Review, Politics, Commentary tradition—that really was not part of the lineage of The Point.

Oppenheimer: Well, that’s interesting.

Baskin: Not to put it too pretentiously, but we would say things to each other like. ‘What if there were Platonic dialogues, but in the form of a magazine written today?’ Those were the kind of things we were thinking about. We were not so much thinking about those more near-to-hand examples.

Oppenheimer: Where did you grow up, John? Did you grow up in New York or Chicago?

Baskin: I grew up in Chicago.

Oppenheimer: I said earlier I had a romance of Social Thought. I also very much had a romance of the New York intellectuals, as did at least some of the N+1 guys. But you grew up in Chicago and then you went to Brown. I had just assumed, before talking to you, that a Jewish intellectual magazine editor of roughly my age—obviously he had a romance of the New York intellectuals, but maybe you didn’t, and then your co-founders, I don’t even know. I guess Zwick is almost certainly Jewish, but I don’t know if Johnny Thakkar is. Maybe not? So you guys didn’t have that in your DNA in the same way?

Baskin: It really was not, and even less for the other editors than for me. Johnny grew up in Manchester, in England, so his ideas of public intellectual life were much more British. Etay was a Deep Springs college student who also spent some time in Oxford. So no, I would say none of us were enamored with the New York intellectuals in the way that many New Yorkers are. Those were not our approximate models.

Oppenheimer: Were there any other journals that were? So you mentioned N+1, but were there any other contemporary journals or was it really N+1 and then you go back to imagining Aristotle and Plato and Socrates walking around Athens?

Baskin: N+1 was really the big one, because remember at that time we were sort of right on the cusp. A lot more magazines were about to start—New Inquiry and Jacobin and revamps of Dissent and these other magazines. But N+1 had changed the paradigm, or maybe gone back to an earlier paradigm, which, as I’m admitting, I was somewhat unaware of.

Before that, I had been much more plugged into things like McSweeney’s, which were much more literary in their orientation and not intellectual in the way N+1 was. The New Republic book section was also certainly an influence on me and certainly part of the formation of what I thought of serious discussion about books and culture. But N+1 was definitely the most conspicuous.

Oppenheimer: I want to tell a quick funny story about the New Republic book section. Well, it’s not really about that, but it’s about that as a signifier in the discourse.

This must have been around 2002 or so, and I ended up at a bar sitting at a table with Keith Gessen and Mark Greif and maybe one or two other people who I didn’t know at that point. I still don’t really know them, though we have a lot of overlap, and I think this must have been before N+1 was founded. We were talking and I said something knowing about how I really liked The New Republic book section, and I think I didn’t know at that point what that precisely meant, but I knew that that was a thing that you said, to sound smart, and Keith Gessen had some response to that which was so withering. It was like, oh yeah, that’s the thing people say, but I’m like three levels of sophistication above that, or at least enough above to know to be contemptuous of people when they say that.

I’ve never quite gotten over that. I’ve never quite gotten over that sort of contempt or condescension towards me, which was the whole vibe of those two guys. I was earnestly trying to connect. I mean, look, I was an idiot in all sorts of ways, but I was earnestly trying to connect as one young Jewish intellectual on the make to another, and he’s just like not having it. Like I’m not gonna connect with you in that way.

It's now 25, 30 years later, and I’m sure they’ve had the shit beaten out of them by life, like we all have. I’m sure they would be slightly embarrassed about that, but I’ve never quite gotten over it.

Baskin: Well, it’s funny you mention The New Republic books section, because I mean that’s absolutely right. I mean that’s unsurprising because N+1 very much defined themselves in some ways against that. In their first issue they had this famous, and very well done, takedown of both McSweeney’s and The New Republic books section, which James Wood then wrote a response to.

But I think even their takedown in print of the books section didn’t fully articulate how hostile they were to what was going on there. And it was funny— when [New Republic books section editor] Leon Wieseltier was unseated and left during the Chris Hughes era, The Point did this kind of marketing thing where we had ads that said, like, ‘You’ve lost The New Republic book section. If you’d like to keep having really rich discussions of literature and culture, why don’t you subscribe to The Point? Here’s a discount.’ And we sent it out, and it was actually quite a successful thing for us at a very early moment in our lifespan. We got a bunch of new subscribers, but it raised some eyebrows in the sort of New York intelligentsia space, which I was very much not a part of at that time, to see us align ourselves in that way with The New Republic books section. For me, it was just a kind of nod to the intellectual seriousness of it, the sense of adventurous writing and thinking that I found there. To them, it was read as a sort of political statement. ‘Oh, these are neocons or crypto conservatives, just like Leon and these people.’ That was how it was received in some of those quarters, and I didn’t find that out until years later.

I think a lot of the time people from a distance viewed The Point as being a lot more sophisticated in that respect than we were. We really were quite naïve, in a sense, and quite distant in those early years from the signifiers of the New York political scene. It just wasn’t stuff we were aware of.

Oppenheimer: I too want to give N+1 credit. As you said, in those first few years, even the first maybe five or 10 years, it was a pretty remarkable magazine, and it really is at the center of the contemporary era of little magazines.

Baskin: They changed the culture.

Oppenheimer: They did. They changed the culture and so that’s really remarkable. They were always incredibly self-serious, and I think that’s part of their identity. I don’t mean to knock it, but it’s true of them, right?

Baskin: It was very appealing to me as a 23-year-old, I’ll say. Maybe I would feel differently today, but that’s part of a little magazine. You are so serious. You kind of have to be.

Oppenheimer: There was a sense of: we are smarter than you. We are better than you. We are more sophisticated than you, but again, they’re not N+1, and how important they are, if they’re not those things.

Baskin: They had a real ambition and they had a project. They wanted to change the world, and as much as you can make fun of that kind of thing from a small magazine, on the other hand, what is the point? And they did change the world.

Oppenheimer: They did change the world.

Baskin: It’s a lot of work. It’s not a lot of money. Why are we doing this if you don’t really want to do something? I mean, the other answer could be, well it’s a good career move. I don’t think that’s what was motivating those guys at that moment. And they had the kind of learning to back it up. I mean, yes they were self-serious and sometimes pretentious, but I think that they also were deeply read people of a type that I’m not sure we’re producing very many of anymore. And that was something that was challenging as a young person. They made you want to read more yourself.

Oppenheimer: You drew a distinction between you guys not having a political project in the sense that N+1 does, and Partisan Review did, but of course it was complicated for Partisan Review. It was founded with an explicit Marxist project, and then it really differentiated itself from the Stalinist Marxist project and severed itself from the party, and that was part of its DNA. We are not going to take our cultural cues from the Soviet Union, from the Communist party, from Marxist ideology. And N+1, which I think has become more predictably ideological over time, when they started I think there was a kind of constructive tension there.

But how did you guys think of yourselves? I mean, how did you define what you were doing other than imagine Platonic dialogues but on contemporary issues? Who were you when you started and how did that evolve?

Baskin: In many ways we hadn’t conceptualized it very much beyond that at the beginning. Something I’ve learned from doing a magazine is that you don’t really know what your magazine’s about until you have published a few issues, and until you see how it’s received by its audience. There’s a way in which that interplay between you and the audience begins to define what you are.

One thing I would say is that the the sort of master discipline of The Point, from the start, was philosophy, whereas for N+1 it was more sociology, literary studies. That colored the kinds of tools and the forms of analysis that I think we were most interested in.

But I think the initial idea, in terms of just to flesh out the Plato thin, was just the idea that there are these conversations that are going on in the society where people are talking across purposes. There are fundamental value questions that lie completely unanswered that are not brought out into the open at all. And so the symposium in the magazine was always the rawest expression of the ethos that we were trying to express. The symposium would be a section where we said, ‘What is X for?’ The first one was: What is politics for? We did: What is film for? What is privacy for? What is America for? What is sex for? And the question is meant to focus on some discussion that’s on the front burner in the society but where we feel that there are unclarified premises. And as it evolved, it did change in my mind exactly what its function was.

Especially as the public sphere became more politicized and more polarized, it became clear to us that something of value that we were doing was providing a space where you could have radically different perspectives, whether philosophical, political, or personal, put in dialogue with one another. So a sort of robust pluralism became a function that people started to come to the magazine for at a time when the culture was getting thinner and thinner in that regard.

So that’s one way in which sort of the image of it changed, but I think the through-line has always been, whether in the symposium or outside of it, that we try to get our writers to grapple with fundamental questions about whatever sort of phenomenon they’re describing. What is the good of this thing? Whether you’re writing about David Foster Wallace or Bernie Sanders, or literary departments, academia, cultural objects, we want to really challenge you to think through what the fundamental question is that’s being addressed.

And I was thinking, as you were asking a question, well, what’s our project? Could you describe it as a project? I don’t know. Maybe it’s more for other people to define what our project is in some sense. But I think the ultimate goal is to have a more through thoughtful and humane and pluralistic public sphere. And the idea being that the humanities, as we encounter them in academia, have a lot of resources to help with this, but that they are often either expressed or not expressed to the public in ways that don’t show their value as much as they could, and that The Point can be a conduit where that kind of thinking can happen.

Oppenheimer: You’re so earnest, John, which is another major feature of The Point.

Baskin: It’s extremely earnest. And again, that’s something that people have told us, and that’s why I think it’s so funny when people are always reading into us these cynical aims, because if we have a fault, it’s more toward the earnest side.

Oppenheimer: That brings up this book, which I’m assuming was your dissertation, that you wrote on David Foster Wallace. His earnestness and Hhyper intellectualism must be in the DNA of the point in, in some respect. So what is that book? What is its argument?

Baskin: The book came out of two things. It came out of my dissertation, but it also came out of an essay that I wrote for the first issue of the point called “Death is Not the End: David Foster Wallace, his legacy and his critics.”

This may be an interesting story to people. When I got to Social Thought, Robert Pippin pulled aside the new class and said, you know, JM Coetzee has left. We need a novelist. Do any of you have suggestions? And I said, how about David Foster Wallace? He’s off in California. He seems like he’s getting tired of teaching writing. He’s from the Midwest. I think he would love being part of this program. And Pippin basically said, yeah, I’ve heard the name. I don’t really know who he is.

Oppenheimer: Oh this is brutal.

Baskin: Most of the professors there didn’t know who he was or had certainly not read him. And to the extent they did think they knew who he was, his reputation was as a sort of over clever postmodernist. It’s very hard for people to remember now that that’s what his reputation was, right? For a lot of his life, despite the fact that he had written a lot about sincerity, it was a common thing for critics to say, well, he wrote this, but look at his novels. There’s no sincerity there. You know, they’re all irony. He was compared to Pynchon and DeLillo.

Oppenheimer: This is brutal by the way, Jon, because there is a parallel timeline n which David Foster Walls ends up at Chicago. And it’s a much more sustaining and generative community for him.

Baskin: We could have saved his life.

Oppenheimer: Robert Pippin could have saved his life.

Baskin: To his credit, Robert Pippin started reading it and that summer, I remember he was reporting to me, ‘Oh, it’s better than I thought.’ You know, he was enjoying it. And then it was that next summer that Wallace died, so there wasn’t a lot of time to make the invitation.

Oppenheimer: Ugh.

Baskin: So my article for The Point was trying to understand Wallace in relation to postmodernism and to sort of correct what I saw as a lot of misperceptions about his project. Many of these things are now more common sense, not because of my article, but there’s been a lot of writing, I think often from people in our generation, who understood his project a lot better than did the older writers who began writing about him, including James Wood, with the hyperrealism essay, this kind of stuff that I think led to certain misconceptions about what he was doing. So my dissertation in a way was built off that, and then the book was built off that essay and the dissertation and added a whole element of the question of whether Wallace is better understood as a philosopher or as an artist. And then if a philosopher, what kind of philosopher? And I tried to think in the book a lot about his relationship to Wittgenstein, which had been written about a lot, but I thought somewhat shallowly. The book is called Ordinary Unhappiness, based on this quote from Freud about the job—

Daniel Oppenheimer: I mean, psychoanalysis was in the mix too, right?

Jon Baskin: Yeah, but Freud in a slightly Wittgensteinian voice. Stanley Cavell of course is the one who connects these two. And Cavell and Wittgenstein were both read a lot in Social Thought. Ultimately the book makes a kind of argument that Wallace’s fiction offers a philosophical therapy to its reader in the sense that Wittgenstein conceived of philosophical therapy, which is to show us that the problems that we’re enmeshed in are often of our own making, or at least to show us which parts of those problems are of our own making. And that the solution is sort of to dissolve the problem, not to come up with a new theory about it.

This itself was part of Wallace’s deep anti-postmodernism in a sense that there was an anti-theoretical aspect to his writing, which is most concretely embodied in the AA portions of Infinite Jest. That’s where you get this valorization of a movement that is explicitly anti-theoretical, explicitly says the point is not to have a good theory of life, but to live a good life. Or a healthy life, a life free of addiction. And the key to that is in a way getting out of your head or finding ways to discipline your thinking in the right kinds of ways.

And it was Wallace’s great insight that this was not just a wisdom for addicts, but for intellectuals. A certain demographic of late Americans who had sort of intellectualized themselves into despair. That’s a lot of what the book is about.

Oppenheimer: It’s interesting thinking about the sustained vitality of The Point and its relationship to you, and presumably to your co-editors. Because I agree with you, when you’re thinking about N+1, that it was never just some strategic maneuver on the part of the founding editors to build a profile so they could go out and write books and write for The New Yorker. But I think they clearly wanted to do those things, and I don’t know the story, but I’m imagining one of the reasons they ultimately handed off the reigns of the magazine to another generation of editors is that those people wanted to go build their profile as novelists, as writers of books, as critics, reporters and things like that, and that that ultimately exacted a cost on the magazine because it’s just some very special, unique, lightning-in-a-bottle alchemy that allows a set of editors to come around, and a voice to coalesce around it, and a sense of taste for certain kinds of writers. And if you get rid of that, it’s like losing founders in the tech space or something like that. You get rid of those people and most of the time the magic will dissipate.

So the fact that you guys have persisted over time is all of why The Point continues to be a vital entity, because you still care. It’s still the locus of your identity, at least for you and to greater or lesser degrees for your other editors. It’s what gets you going. You’re still in the mix in all of the important ways.

Jon Baskin: I mean, every magazine, small magazines in particular, faces this problem of succession, or of how you grow over time. Being 15, 16 years old now, that question has come up at several key points for us, and I am a lot more involved than the other two founding editors are at this point.

Jonny’s still involved, but less than he used to be. He’s a tenured professor and has three kids. We all have families now, which is itself a huge challenge in terms of the free time that you need to run a small magazine.

Oppenheimer: Do you have a teaching gig too?

Baskin: I’m teaching at NYU right now, and I’ve taught in the past at the New School. A lot of the reinvigoration we’ve had over the years is because we have been able to bring new people in while maintaining the basic DNA of the magazine. Anastasia Berg became part of the magazine in 2015 or so. She’s now, I would say, a co-editor with me at the sort of top of the magazine, along with Rachel Wiseman and Becca Rothfeld. These people are very involved in the day-to-day operations and the thinking of the magazine. And I think both having younger people come in and new voices has been extremely important in expandeding the range, the diversity of the magazine.

There’s always the danger, when you bring in young people or new people, that they have a completely different vision of the magazine than you. And there’s a question facing any left magazine: Are you sort of with us or against us? And because we never had that political affiliation, it’s given us more room to maneuver over the years. But of course there have been moments where we’ve had editors who have wanted to push us in one direction or another politically and you’re sort of repeatedly thrown up this against this demand to say where you stand on one or another issue. And that’s where I think it becomes important having those people steering the magazine who have a real sense of ‘This is what the magazine is for and if we start doing this other thing, there’s six other magazines that do this better than we’re gonna do it. There are plenty of other places for people to go for that.’ And you do have to have that sense of what it is that you distinctively do and what people come to you for. And that’s where I think the connection to the founding can be really important. But at the same time, you need to be flexible enough to allow those newer people to have a real impact and influence.

Oppenheimer: So you can answer this with as much candor and concreteness as you want. But I’d say the dynamic is two things. It’s one, when there is a left out there that is potentially exerting pressure on you. But I think more powerfully and more, in a lot of cases, destructively in a lot of these institutions and entities, is the pressure from the staff. And I’m not just talking about magazines. I’m talking about the whole swath of the liberal establishment, liberal, political, intellectual, academic, nonprofit establishment during the last decade, which often just capitulated to voices from their younger staff or their younger leadership, who are saying you’re with us or you’re against us.

Did you have moments of crisis, internal crisis, or had you been judicious enough about who you were bringing into the mix so that you guys were all already on the same page and were looking from the same perspective at this thing that was happening, this coalescence of a new left and its power within cultural institutions and its desire for political conformity.

Did you face crises?

Baskin: I don’t know if I’d say crises, but we definitely faced internal conflict. I don’t want to get into too much detail or give the names, but the summer of the George Floyd protests, we lost two progressive editors and one conservative editor, all of whom were upset with how we chose or chose not to engage with the big issues of that time.

I don’t know that those things could have been avoided in some ways, but I did learn from that just to make sure I was clearer with people, when they came on to the magazine, about what our commitments were and what they weren’t, and to make sure that they would be okay being a part of a magazine that felt this way about those things.

And I should say, to our credit, I still have relationships with all those people. It was not horribly acrimonious in any case. But I do think they just realized they had a different set of values and beliefs around certain core issues than the editors of the magazine. So I do try to be clearer with people now, if they’re going to come on in any kind of official capacity with the magazine, and I ask some of those questions more upfront than I did before. But even then people change, and you don’t know how they’re going to respond or when an issue’s gonna come up that tests those beliefs.

Most people will say to you, oh yeah, of course I’m open-minded, and I think it’s important for intellectual life to give space to different views. Almost everyone will say that, even more now, but it’s in the examples where things come out. More recently, like a lot of magazines, the Israel-Palestine stuff has definitely been complicated for us. There were questions within the magazine of whether we should release a statement of some kind or make an editorial statement about where we stand on this issue, and we had a discussion about whether that’s really something The Point does in an editorial voice. Of course, we’re willing to publish writers who make arguments about these issues, but I think it’s helpful in these situations to be able to point to the fact that we do not have a history of taking stances on first order political issues. As a magazine, we make arguments about how we think intellectual life ought to be conducted, but we do not say: this is what we think about healthcare, or abortion or whatever as a magazine.

And that is very important to me because for the magazine to be a space where you can have these conversations where people legitimately have a chance of being exposed to an argument they’ve never heard before, or never agreed with before, in the magazine, I think it’s important for the editors to not make those statements, at least within the magazine, even though we may have very strong convictions ourselves.

Oppenheimer: That’s such a University of Chicago thing to say.

Baskin: It is, and well it’s funny. People who come from U Chicago, who get the U Chicago culture, often have a much easier time understanding what The Point is trying to do. But it’s not so much about the U Chicago neutrality principles or that kind of stuff. To me, the core of the magazine is much more in what’s known as the core at University of Chicago. It’s sort of the undergraduate version of what I was saying before with Social Thought, that the greatest questions have answers that are coherent and truthful on several different sides of them. And to be humble about that and to provide space for that conversation to happen and for people to actually see it is a big part of what one does as an intellectual. That’s in a way the highest mission for us as a magazine, to create a forum where that kind of conversation can happen.

And so you’re just very wary of things that will jeopardize that.

Oppenheimer: I think one of the things that is hard when you hand off leadership to a new person who’s younger, who is maybe doesn’t have quite the same relationship to the founding of the magazine or the identity of the magazine is that even if their heart is in the right place, it becomes muc harder for them to hold firm, even if they wanted to, in the midst of the crucible, you know, post October 7th or post the war in Gaza, or post George Floyd, when there’s an enormous pressure to join a side. It is harder for the person who inherited the mantle of editorship to hold the line on its identity than it is for the founder.

The founder’s like, ‘This is my fucking baby. Like I poured my heart and soul into this. I don’t want to sacrifice it to the exigencies of the political moment.’ I’m sure there are examples of a successful handing off of responsibility of an institution to the next generation, but most of the time the founder has more of that enmeshment of their identity with the identity of the magazine.

The other thing I was gonna say is that it’s a good point you made about how, had you guys gone that way, thrown in with a side, there were six other magazines are doing that and they’re gonna do it better than we are. And I think purely from a self-interested perspective, and it’s surprising to me that more magazines don’t get this, it’s a bad play. If you look at the history of intellectual endeavors, magazines, the ones that we talk about now are the ones that manage to hold onto their core identity. It’s not the ones who conformed in a moment of political intensity to whatever the theory or the perspective of the moment was. Those those fall by the wayside. Or if we talk about them at all, it’s because they were vital and then they just capitulated. They just became communists in the thirties or boring new left advocates or enthusiasts in the sixties, or George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, MeToo woke entities in the teens or twenties or something like that. The history of political intellectual life is littered with failures in that way. The successes are the ones that stuck to their guns and it, and it’s strange to me that more editors of magazines don’t recognize that.

Baskin: You probably know the history better than me. All I know is that in the late 2010s, you certainly had a convergence of a lot of magazines onto the same ground.I remember being in New York in that moment, and earlier in that decade, and I think everyone just sort of a assumed The Point was just like them, but the Chicago version or whatever. People would use “we” all the time. ‘Well, here’s what we are doing.’ And they would have events at each other’s offices, and, and the same writers were shuttling between these different places, and as the decade went on, they more and more converged on the same ideas.

And I think for us, like you said, it was a survival thing. Partly that no one’s going to go to The Point if what they want is a left activist magazine. I mean, this even became a problem for places like N+1 once you had Jacobin and then later the podcasts. I think N+1 retained and even grew its audience during this time, because it was an exciting time to be a left intellectual, and that’s part of why there was a temptation in that direction. It felt like things were really happening there. But Jacobin grew more than anyone because they were like, ‘Look, we’re the party paper. Come read us.’ And I have respect for Jacobin. They were always very upfront about what they’re doing. There’s a role for that kind of magazine. There’s nothing wrong with those magazines existing, but it’s important to know whether that’s what your magazine is and what it’s value is to people.