Cupid’s pen: On the heels of Valentine’s Day weekend, The Harper Review has two topical releases—Noël Da’s close reading of love songs and Mimi Mikhailov’s account of post-party love. Da, drawing a lineage from the Romanticists to The Cranberries, traces the counterintuitive logic behind expressions of love that move us. Mikhailov proposes, through Harry’s eleventh-hour monologue in When Harry Met Sally, a method of loving through perspicacious observation. Both, through careful writing about their texts, practice what they preach: that the heart demands articulation, “a worthy goal for any writer or lover.”
Emily Sun, senior editor
Liberal imaginations: One of the more common refrains bandied about in the glut of op-eds that emerged after the 2024 US presidential election was the sentiment that the Democratic Party needs an affirmative agenda. Beyond running against Donald Trump, a successful Democratic campaign ought to offer a vision of the good life in which voters can believe. To date, two rival sets of ideas have attempted to fulfill that need: Ezra Klein-led abundance and left-wing populism. More recently, it seems as if the newfound momentum that enervated Democratic operations has, at least temporarily, tabled conversations about the next steps of the American left. The Party canceled the release of their long-awaited 2024 campaign ‘autopsy,’ reasoning that the document could ignite an intraparty firestorm and distract recent victories in special elections.
For those on the left outside of campaign offices, however, the question remains pressing. Last week, The Point released their 36th issue, a forum of nine essays on “the left and the good life” that offers positive strictures for the future. Liberals drew themselves into a corner with the tenet that a good society should do nothing more than empower individuals to realize their ideal life. To respond to that pessimism, co-founder and editor Jon Baskin proposes left-liberals must question—and perhaps jettison—some of their most fundamental assumptions.
Will Moursund, contributing editor
Drinking together: Alcohol consumption among American adults has plummeted since 2022, hitting a 90-year low in 2025. The downward trend is especially common among Gen Z and millennials, many of whom are leaving drinking behind for the sake of their health or wallet. As a result, the wine industry is rebranding for younger customers who are more likely to buy an aesthetically pleasing bottle for a special occasion than a box of Franzia for casual consumption.
If you’re looking for a way to ignore the health warnings on moderate drinking without burning a hole in your pocket, I recommend Thursday night wine tastings at 57th Street Wines. As Jacqueline Oury wrote in her recent letter for The Harper Review, bacchanals (in this case, free wine tastings) allow young people to resist society’s individualistic tendencies. Oury urged us to “go out, go dance, sweat on people, meet people in the bathroom, meet people outside, meet people inside, feel the beat of your generation rising from the thrum of the bass.” There is no dancing and no bathroom access at Hyde Park’s premiere wine shop, but maybe the bottle displays will help you touch base with your generation’s beat.
Elena Eisenstadt, contributing editor
Bailo, ergo sum: With 128.2 million concurrent viewers, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX Halftime Show is the fourth-most viewed performance of its kind, and the first delivered in Spanish. For many Latinos, the performance brought hope amid political strife through his lyrics, speeches, choreography, and props. But other viewers probably felt more surprise when, after saying “God bless America,” the musician’s list of countries spanned the entire continent, from Canada to Chile. Deliberate in its execution, Bad Bunny’s performance modeled how to stage a conversation when words are insufficient.
At a Super Bowl press conference, the artist remarked of his viewers, “They don’t even have to learn Spanish … it’s better if they learn to dance … there’s no better dance than the one that can come from the heart,” signaling the body’s affective potential. Focusing on dance over language, the show reminded us that the body is a medium for understanding ourselves and others. By dancing, we can express our positions even if we don’t know where we stand on them. Our bodies perceive and react, arguably before we do. We must let ourselves feel and acknowledge our carnality, if only to let affect, the unspoken things that move and shape us, complement reason. For when reason fails, affect’s rectifying force becomes recognizable—and it is through this mode of embodied thinking that we can best heed the revolutionary capabilities of Bad Bunny’s performance.
Maximiliano Mendoza, contributing editor
Critiquing the critic: No one does theories and theories-about-theories better than the University of Chicago, and so it was fitting that its Parrhesia Program for Public Thinking and Discourse hosted critic Merve Emre at a lecture and a lunch in the first week of February titled “The Function of Criticism” and “Becoming a Critic.”
In the respectably crowded Swift Hall lecture room, Emre’s lecture began with the usual academic procedures: introducing the speaker who would introduce her, misattributing a Yeats line to Shakespeare, quoting Arendt on the importance of thinking, and enumerating a long list of her accolades and publications. Finally, Emre took the podium. After prefacing by critiquing the “anxious answers” people have offered to “anxious questions” about criticism’s future in a world where Letterboxd, Goodreads, Substack and their avalanches of unfiltered opinions are the most widespread form of critique, she began by cracking open a La Croix and turning over a page. Continue reading online.
Reilly Pryma, assistant digital editor
Image: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Dance under the Trees at the Edge of the Lake, oil on canvas, 1865–70 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).