Short answers, pulled from the story.
Yuval Noah Harari is best known for Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, first published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014. The book has been translated into roughly 45 languages and spent 96 consecutive weeks in the top three of the New York Times Best Seller list.
Harari studied history and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1993 to 1998, specialising in medieval and military history. He completed his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in 2002 as a postgraduate student of Jesus College, supervised by Steven J. Gunn, and held a Yad Hanadiv postdoctoral fellowship from 2003 to 2005.
Harari has stated that "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so." At the 2016 Davos Forum he argued that the Fourth Industrial Revolution would split humanity between a superelite and a mass of "useless people," and he has written that artificial intelligence and bioengineering are likely to usher in an era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection.
Academic reception has been largely critical. Anthropologist Christopher Robert Hallpike wrote in 2020 that Sapiens should be regarded as "infotainment" rather than serious scholarship, arguing that Harari's original claims are often wrong. Neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan, writing in Current Affairs in July 2022, stated that Harari "sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors."
Itzik Yahav is Harari's husband and personal manager. They met in 2002 and married in a civil ceremony in Toronto, Canada, because Israel only recognises civil marriages conducted abroad. Together they founded Sapienship in 2019 and donated one million dollars to the World Health Organization during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Harari has practised Vipassana meditation since 2000 and has said it "transformed" his life. As of 2017 he practised for two hours every day and undertook an annual silent retreat of at least 30 days. He dedicated Homo Deus to his teacher S. N. Goenka and credited fifteen years of Vipassana practice as essential to writing the book.