Michael Sokolove is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, as well as the author of two previous books, The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and The Boys of Crenshaw and Hustle: The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose. He has appeared on numerous national television and radio news shows, including ABC's Good Morning America and Prime Time Thursday, ESPN's Outside the Lines, and CNN's Paula Zahn Now. He has been a guest on the National Public Radio shows Fresh Air, The Tavis Smiley Show, and Only a Game.

At the New York Times Magazine, and previously with the Sunday magazine of the Philadelphia Inquirer, he has written on wide range of topics -– from life in inner-city America, to eco-terrorism, to presidential politics, to the question of whether would-be assassin John Hinckley should go free. Sokolove's specialty has been the sociology and culture of sports, and he has done some of the most important and provocative writing about sports today.

In December 2002, his cover story in the New York Times Magazine ("Football is A Sucker's Game") showed how one virtually unknown university, the University of South Florida, was pouring tens of millions of dollars into football to "put itself on the map." The story exposed the astronomical financial and cultural costs of big-time college football, and it foreshadowed much of what was soon to occur in college sports. "Universities run from conference to conference, chasing richer TV deals; coaches from school to school, chasing cash," the story said. "It's a game of mergers and acquisitions -– of running out on your partners before they run out on you." Six months after the story appeared, the University of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College bolted from the Big East Conference, setting off a chain reaction in other conferences and throwing the whole college sports landscape into chaos.

In Sokolove's January 2003 cover story in the New York Times Magazine ("In Pursuit of Doped Excellence"), he revealed the future of performance enhancement in sports -– genetic manipulation -– by visiting a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania where mice had been genetically altered to have high levels of IGF-1, a growth factor. "They were built like cattle, with thick necks and big haunches," he wrote. "They belonged in some kind of mouse rodeo." Sokolove wrote that Major League Baseball, in terms of drug cheating, was the equivalent of "East Germany in the 1980s: a frontier." Two days after this story appeared, President Bush, in his State of the Union message, decried the use of performance enhancement in sports and called specifically on baseball to take stronger measures.

Michael Sokolove's latest work, The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw, displays the same kind of distinctive writing about sports -– combining on-the-ground reporting and evocative story-telling with fresh thinking and new insights. By looking at one team, the 1979 Crenshaw High Cougars, the greatest assemblage of talent in the history of high school baseball, Sokolove explores the myth that sports is the ticket out of the inner city.

Sokolove lives in Bethesda, Md., with his wife Ann Gerhart, a writer for the Washington Post, and their three children, Sara, Sofia, and Bill.