Joshua Hammer

Joshua Hammer was born in New York and graduated from Princeton University with a cum laude degree in English literature. He joined the staff of Newsweek as a business and media writer in 1988, and between 1993 and 2006 served as a bureau chief and correspondent-at-large on five continents. Hammer is now a contributing editor to Smithsonian and Outside, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books< and has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, The Atlantic, and The Atavist Magazine. He has won numerous journalism awards. Since 2007 he has been based in Berlin, Germany, and continues to travel widely around the world. [adapted from The Bad Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (2016)]