Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Dissent, where she is a contributing editor. Her first book, Personal Stereo, a cultural history of the Walkman, will published by Bloomsbury in September.

Semi-Tropic Spiritualists is a project by Los Angeles-based artists Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg. Their performance works and objects explore the history of spiritual and occult belief through the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, an organization that created a campsite meeting place outside the city limits of Los Angeles in 1905. Swendsrud and Gomez-Heitzeber are interested in spiritualism – in its early conception articulated as part science, part philosophy and part religion – as a model for exploring ideas of faith and skepticism, belief and charlatanism, as well as for the development of a space dedicated to investigation and the search for knowledge. Their work has been presented at Richard Telles Fine Art, the Vincent Price Museum, Shangri-La, and Chime & Co., among others.