Rebecca Mead was born in London, and educated at Oxford and at NYU. Her first job was as a fact-checker at New York Magazine, where she later became a contributing editor; she has also contributed to many newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Times of London, the New York Times Book Review, and the London Review of Books. Since 1997 she has been a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she has written about legalized prostitution, the infertility industry's trade in human eggs, the Spring Break business, and God-based diet programs, among many other subjects. She has written more than a hundred Talk of the Town stories, and has interviewed everyone from goat herders in Mongolia to members of the fashion-obsessed social elite of Sao Paulo, and from Slavoj Zizek to Shaquille O'Neal. One Perfect Day is her first book.