Nicholas Schmidle is an author, playwright and screenwriter. He was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker whose most recent book is Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut. His first book, To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan, drew from his reporting as an ICWA fellow examining ethnic, sectarian and national identity in Pakistan from 2006 to 2008, when he was accompanied by his wife Rikki. Nick is a National Magazine Award finalist, a two-time Livingston Award finalist and winner of the Kurt Schork Award. He’s been a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, a fellow at the New America Foundation and a professor of journalism at Princeton University.