A. J. Jacobs is a journalistic stuntman in the tradition of George Plimpton and Hunter S. Thompson who chooses a topical or peculiar actvity and immerses himself in it for a set amount of time, then writes a book about the expeirence. For his first book, The Know-It-All, Jacobs read through all 32 volumes (33,000 pages and 44 million words) of Encyclopedia Britannica alphabetically. Then, Jacobs committed to a year following the Talmudic laws of the Bible as literally as possible and wrote The Year of Living Biblically.
Why should anyone care? Because Jacobs is a well-schooled auteur and the feigned earnestness of these quests makes for entertaining, if not enlightening, reading. Most of the these pieces previously appeared in the pages of Esquire magazine, where he is an editor at large. |
 The Guinea Pig Diaries from "240 Minutes of Fame," in which the author pretends to be Australian actor Noah Taylor from Shine My night of fame put me in an altered state. I was drunk with fame, and not just buzzed, but seven-vodka-tonics drunk. The question is, Would I want to be drunk all the time? I don’t think so. I hope not. Why? Because fame messes with your mind—even the fleeting version I had. In fact, if you believe a Cornell professor named Robert Millman, I might have been suffering from an honest-to-God mental disorder. Acquired Situational Narcissism. This is a multisyllabic way of saying that celebrities often become wankers. When you’re famous, when everybody stares at you, flatters you, insulates you, you start to think you’re the center of the world (a thought that has a grain of truth to it). |
From
"The Unitasker," in which the author avoids multitasking
"It's just that there are so many temptations. So many needs to fill. Snacks, cups of water, caffeine, curiosity about what Julie's doing. I pop up from my desk once every five minutes." |
