Journalist and former Salon.com columnist Mary Roach is the author of the newly released Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, which comes on the heels of her best-seller, Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers. She has written for Outside, GQ, Vogue, and the New York Times Magazine. She writes the humor column “My Planet” in Reader’s Digest and is a contributing editor for the science magazine Discover. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Ed.