On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Jess Swoboda and Zach Fine talk to the writer Adam Shatz about James Baldwin's essay “Alas, Poor Richard” (1961), a eulogy of sorts for Richard Wright, and Adam's new book, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso 2023), which gathers a series of intellectual portraits of great thinkers and writers such as Wright, Claude-Levi Strauss, Chester Himes, Jacques Derrida, Fouad Ajami and Edward Said.