Meet the Journalist: Joshua Hammer on Mali

Former Newsweek correspondent, now a freelance magazine writer and author, Joshua Hammer talks about his project, "Taking Timbuktu: Music, Manuscripts and Madness at the Edge of the Sahara."

He discusses the history of Mali and explores the effect of the Tuareg rebels who seized control of a chunk of Mali's territory in 2012. Hammer talks about meeting with a librarian who saved tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts produced in Timbuktu, befriending the founder of the celebrated Festival in the Desert, and a very scary trip to northeast Mali where Tuareg rebels and Al Qaeda are still at war.