Maria Konnikova is the author of Mastermind and The Confidence Game. She is a regular contributing writer for The New Yorker, and has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, Slate, the New Republic, the Paris Review, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, the Boston Globe,  the Scientific American MIND, WIRED, and Smithsonian. Maria graduated  from Harvard University and received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University.