Dan Baum is the author of Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, and Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty. Born in New Jersey, Dan has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he covered the military, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. He’s been a reporter for the Anchorage Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and The Wall Street Journal.