Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, and the self-proclaimed originator of the flash mob. With his wife, the veterinarian Monica Murphy, he has co-written two books: Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals (Knopf, 2024) and Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus (Viking, 2012). Wasik is also the author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture (Viking, 2009) and the editor of Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine (New Press, 2008).