Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek Magazine foreign correspondent on five continents and the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, The Falcon Thief, and The Mesopotamian Riddle. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Outside. He lives in Berlin.