Dr. Erik Hoel is one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in science and also a New York City Emerging Writers Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Baffler, and The Daily Beast, among many others, and his essays and short stories have won numerous awards, from getting first place in the Writer’s Digest Annual Fiction Award to being included as a notable essay in the 2017 Best American Essays Collection. Erik received his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, has held a visiting scholarship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and is now a research professor at Tufts University where he studies consciousness and emergence. Originally, he grew up in his mother’s independent bookstore, The Jabberwocky, where he worked as a teenager, and is a lifelong writer and book lover. He runs a popular Substack, The Intrinsic Perspective, and lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.