Gideon Lewis-Kraus grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Stanford. He writes reportage and criticism and is the author of the digressive travel memoir A Sense of Direction as well as the Kindle Single No Exit. He is a writer at large at the New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, and a contributing writer at WIRED magazine. Gideon co-edited, with Arnie Eisen, Philip Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order III, and edited Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Cultural Politics. He teaches nonfiction in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia. He has lived in San Francisco, Berlin (where he was a 2007–8 Fulbright Fellow), and Shanghai, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.