Ellen Wayland- Smith is Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well Set Table (Picador 2016), The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and a forthcoming book of essays, The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self (Milkweed 2024). Her essays and reviews have appeared in Guernica, The American Scholar, The Millions, Aeon Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places.