In doing to research on the Wired wiki article, I came across this fellow: A.J. Jacobs. Someone (a critic) once describe him as a “bag person’s Dave Barry” — to which he replied: “I am actually a bag person’s David Sedaris.” Mostly, he’s an author for Esquire et al who has some pretty remarkable ways of looking at society.
My interest started by learning that the Wired article experiement was predated by a year with something Jacobs proposed to the Wikipedia community. He, too, had the bright idea to write about wikis and let wiki authors do the fix-up work. It was somewhat different in that it only lasted a few days, and he purposely tagged the original draft with intentional errors. I’ll save that story for a later time, but Jacobs also caught my eye for a few of his other writing projects:
- The Know-It-All — Jacobs tries to be the world’s smartest person by reading all 44 million words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- The Year of Living Biblically — Jacobs has spent the past few months feverishly finishing up this new 2006 book about his attempt to live his life obeying in the Bible in most literal sense. Jacobs goes beyond the Ten Commandments and lessons from the parables into less well-known rules, such as stoning adulterers and not shaving. The book is already optioned by Paramount for a movie. Here’s hoping they get someone like Louis Theroux, whose Weird Weekends show on BBC was a pregnancy staple for Amy and I. I’ll stop digressing in a moment, but that show is available in the UK on DVD, but not yet in the US.
- America Off-Line — Jacobs takes every popularist Internet term and flips it backwards to write a book about living in the real world. “Take the electronic exit ramp and pull into the Information Driveway with this comprehensive guide to the Outernet.”
- The Two Kings: Jesus and Elvis — An examination of the “eerie similarities” between the King of Jews and the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Paul Dourish, no less, has stripped the pictorial down to just Jacob’s text and posted it on his site.
- I Have A (Revised) Dream — Jacob’s updating of Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous speech in Washintgon, D.C. As in, “I have a dream that one day, little black boys and little white boys will stand side by side, quoting gangsta rap with their pants sagging down below their asses.”
- My Outsourced Life — The premise is that Jacobs hired a team from Bangalore, India, to take care of everything in his life … e-mail, shoping, domestic disputes, reading to children. Eventually, there will be an Esquire-sponsored website. His quest to have a bio written for him by someone in India is what led him to get involved with Wikipedia and his open-edited wiki article.
