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Walter Kirn is an American novelist, literary critic, and essayist best known for authoring Up in the Air, which was adapted into a major motion picture starring George Clooney, as well as Thumbsucker and the memoir Blood Will Out, detailing his friendship with the con artist “Clark Rockefeller." Educated at Princeton and Oxford, Kirn has contributed essays and reviews to Time, The New York Times Book Review, GQ, Esquire, and others, and is the co‐founder of the print magazine County Highway while co‐hosting the podcast America This Week.