“I always say, ‘This is my last project on Kant.’ And it never is.” Anastasia Berg, AM’13, PhD’17, is an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Irvine, where she specializes in moral philosophy and its history. She acknowledges that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose work was the subject of her dissertation, continues to loom large in her teaching and research.
But while describing her role as a writer and editor at The Point magazine, Berg jokes that thinking about Kant is her day job. She is also interested in applying her philosophical training to contemporary problems—and sparking thoughtful public dialogue about them. She shares this purpose with her colleagues at The Point, which was founded in 2008 by three doctoral students in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought: Jon Baskin, AM’12, PhD’16; Jonny Thakkar, AM’13, PhD’13; and Etay Zwick, EX’14. According to the publication’s website, the editors are motivated by the beliefs that “humanistic thinking has relevance for contemporary life” and that “our lives are full of experiences worth thinking about.”
In its nearly two-decade run, the magazine has garnered critical accolades and a substantial following for its rigorous and sometimes surprising interventions into topics driving public conversation, such as political violence, contemporary masculinity, and the purpose of higher education. Berg joined the editorial team in 2015 and credits her colleagues there with stimulating key conversations that have shaped not only her work as an editor but also her subsequent writing, which has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Cut, as well as The Point.
Additionally, in 2024 Berg and her fellow Point editor Rachel Wiseman, AB’12, examined one issue at greater length, publishing What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin’s, 2024), a book whose central question they and other writers had explored in a themed issue of The Point in 2019. The question was personally resonant for the authors—highly educated professional women in their early 30s who were contemplating whether they wanted to become parents. Looking for resources to help them think through the issue, they were dissatisfied by the discourse they encountered in print media, social media, and other sources of public dialogue.
Their discontent with the public conversation motivated their research on the issues and anxieties people face when trying to think about having children, including material worries, feminist concerns about reconciling women’s liberation with motherhood, and antinatalist arguments that question the legitimacy of having children at all. Both authors included personal essays that bookend their critical intervention into the discussion: Wiseman writes about overcoming her ambivalence about having children, and Berg explores how having a child taught her to resist the narrative that having a baby must radically transform a woman’s identity.
The most gratifying reactions to the book, Berg recounts, came from people who credited her and Wiseman with helping them overcome “hindrances to thinking clearly and freely about the issue” of whether to choose parenthood, “giving them tools to approach the question differently” through writing that “we hope is engaging and a kind of a live text for people to think with and through.” Since the book’s publication, Berg has continued to identify new writing projects “when I feel like there is a dissatisfaction and I can give words to it,” such as her observations on the use of artificial intelligence in higher education, which she believes will impair students’ cognitive competence, as she recently wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times.
Berg’s role as an editor at The Point gives her the opportunity to work with authors she identifies as similarly positioned to provide fresh perspectives on contentious topics. She enjoys the opportunity to expand her thinking alongside writers who are uniquely suited to address complex problems catalyzing public conversation. From its earliest issues, the publication has partnered with up-and-coming writers. These partnerships have also provided Berg with a valuable chance to nurture writers by “taking them through the steps of writing a truly compelling, beautiful, stylish essay with a voice that’s making a fresh point.” Like Berg and Wiseman, some of the authors who honed their craft through collaborations at The Point have gone on to publish books and articles in high-profile legacy media outlets, including UChicago Humanities alumni Jake Bittle, AB’17; Megan Buskey, AB’04; Lauren Michele Jackson, PhD’19; Antón Barba-Kay, AM’09, PhD’13; and James Duesterberg, AM’11, PhD’16, who is a lecturer in the College.
While growing its stable of authors over the years, the magazine has also earned a dedicated following among a “public that’s curious, that’s intellectually motivated,” says Berg. So she and her colleagues began to think about making a greater impact. In 2023 they found an opportunity: The Point began the Program for Public Thinking, a partnership with UChicago’s Parrhesia Public Thought and Discourse program, expanding its reach by cocreating events at the University, including a summer workshop for undergraduates across the country and year-round classes in the College.
Berg emphasizes that training students to engage in public dialogue is not part of her usual work as a university professor. “I can have students who want to study philosophy and have nothing to do with becoming public thinkers or writers, and that’s great,” she says, “but what about those who do?” For the 2026 summer workshop, she will colead a session titled “The Good Life,” which aims to help students investigate “what it means to live meaningfully today and what kinds of communities and commitments such a life entails.”
At a time of intense debate about the benefits of a university education—and particularly a humanistic education—Berg characterizes The Point’s collaboration with the Parrhesia program as modeling an important relationship between universities and the public. “Our ambition, with both the magazine and the program, is to bring the best of the university to the public, but also the best of the public—its concerns and insights—back to academics and back into academic life.”
She’s proud of how she and her colleagues try to create their ideal public-university conversation by building diverse groups of student thinkers at the program’s summer workshops. “We place a great emphasis on having people come from very different educational institutions: Alongside students from elite universities, we have people coming from state schools, community colleges, Christian colleges, HBCUs.” Together they tackle issues in the public eye that most compel the students’ interest.
“We think the program for public thinking is going to allow, to formalize, and institutionalize the possibility of doing something that’s very exciting when you’re within a university,” Berg says, “which is to ask yourself: ‘How are these texts I’m reading and these questions I’m asking going to help me think through some of the most important things in my own life, be they personal, romantic, social, or political?”