Ben Ash Blum was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. He is the author of Ranger Games, a critically-acclaimed nonfiction book about an armed bank robbery conducted by elite U.S. Army Rangers, one of them his younger cousin, and The Lifespan of a Lie, a groundbreaking exposé of the Stanford prison experiment. He holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of California Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.