Ellen Wayland-Smith is the author of three books, 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 (UChicago Press, 2020), and The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self (Milkweed Editions, 2024). She covers memoir and nonfiction for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is a professor at the University of Southern California.