Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic/essayist and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other crevices of the American psyche. Her seven books include Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, and Against Love: A Polemic; her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, Atlantic, The New Republic, Harper’s, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere, and are included in The Best American Essays 2016 (ed. Jonathan Franzen) and 2023 (ed. Vivian Gornick), and in The Contemporary American Essay (ed. Phillip Lopate). She’s a professor emerita in the Dept. of Radio-TV-Film at Northwestern University, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows, the NEA and Yaddo.