Timothy Noah is a senior editor of The New Republic, where he writes the TRB column and a political blog. Previously he was a senior writer at Slate, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, an assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report, and an editor of the Washington Monthly. In 2011 Noah's ten-part Slate magazine series, "The Great Divergence," which formed the basis of this book, won the Sidney Hillman Award for magazine journalism, and in 2010 Noah was a National Magazine Award finalist in the online news reporting category for his Slate coverage of the health care reform bill. Noah has edited two posthumous volumes of journalism by his late wife, Marjorie Williams, including the New York Times bestseller "The Woman At The Washington Zoo," which in 2006 won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He lives in Washington with his two teenage children.