Mann was born in 1955 and graduated from
Amherst College in 1976. Mann has written for
Fortune,
The New York Times,
Smithsonian,
Technology Review,
Vanity Fair, and
The Washington Post. In 2005 he wrote
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, followed in 2011 by
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. He served as a judge for the
PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2012. He has also written for the TV series
Law & Order. He is a three-time
National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of writing awards from the
American Bar Association, the
American Institute of Physics, the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the
Lannan Foundation. In 2018, Mann published
The Wizard and the Prophet, which details two competing theories about the future of
agriculture,
population, and the
environment. The titular "wizard" Mann refers to is
Norman Borlaug, the
Nobel Peace Prize winner credited with developing the
Green Revolution and saving one billion people from starvation. Mann refers to
William Vogt, an early proponent of population control, as the "prophet". ==Bibliography==