David Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly and, prior to that, a senior writer at Harper’s. He is also a contributing editor at Golf Digest. He is the author of more than a dozen books: High School, about the four months he spent pretending to be a high-school student; None of the Above, an exposé of the standardized-testing industry; The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning, a collection of his pieces from Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly; The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Home Improvement; Around the House, a collection of essays about domestic life; The First National Bank of Dad: The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money; Copies in Seconds, about the invention of the Xerox machine; and Sheetrock & Shellac, a sequel to The Walls Around Us. In addition, he has written four books about golf—My Usual Game, The Making of the Masters, The Chosen One, and Hit & Hope—and he co-edited a collection of golf stories entitled Lure of the Links. His most recent book is Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, which grew out of a widely discussed 2004 New Yorker essay called “Green Manhattan.” He lives in Washington, Connecticut, with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman. They have two grown children.