Avram Alpert is a writer and teacher. He previously worked at Princeton and Rutgers Universities and co-founded the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York City. He is currently a research fellow at the New Institute in Hamburg where he is completing a new manuscript, While We're Here: Twenty-One Essays on Belonging in this World. His previous books are: The Good-Enough Life (Princeton University Press, 2022), A Partial Enlightenment: What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us About Living Well without Perfection (Columbia University Press, 2021), and Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki (SUNY Press, 2019). His writing has also appeared in Aeon, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Truthout, and elsewhere.