Emily Benedek is an American journalist and author. She is a graduate of Harvard College. She has written for Newsweek, The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and Glamour, among others. She writes regularly for Tablet magazine. To research her novel, Red Sea, Benedek followed an FBI special agent working counterterrorism for a year. She has spent hundreds of hours interviewing foreign covert operators and wrote about an American F-15c fighter pilot. She has reported multiple stories about computer hackers.