LAURA KIPNIS is a cultural critic 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 have been translated into fifteen languages. Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University where she teaches filmmaking. Kipnis’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Slate, Atlantic, Harper’s, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. She lives in New York and Chicago.