Robert N. Watson is distinguished professor of English at UCLA, where he has served as chair of the Faculty of Letters and Science and vice provost for educational innovation. He is the author of Cultural Evolution and Its Discontents: Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure (2018), as well as books about Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Japanese cinema, the history of the fear of death, and the roots of modern environmentalism in Renaissance literature and painting. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker and many other journals.