by A. J. Jacobs
CHAPTER 1: MY LIFE AS A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
2 How about Internet dating: In case it helps any online daters, I present the extended list of my instant deal breakers:
Pirate talk in the opening e-mail (One guy wrote “Avast ye matey! I’m comin’ aboard.”)
User names that contain allusions to the Kennedy assassination (e.g., Zapruder, unless the guy happens to be named Zapruder)
The suitor demanding a fast reply, because he only has one day left on his free trial (I got that several times.)
The suitor using the same opening line he used a month ago, oblivious to the fact that he’d failed the first time. Namely: “Your pic brightened my day. The rest of the day was terrible—I lost my cell phone on the Long Island Rail Road. LOL!” He apparently loses his cell phone a lot.
CHAPTER 2: MY OUTSOURCED LIFE
24 Sexiest Woman Alive: For those who are wondering. Jessica Biel was named Esquire’s sexiest woman that year. And yes, she does like swordfish!
24 I outsource a whole mess of online errands to Asha: Asha also signed me up for Netflix, and I outsourced my movie picks to her. She did pretty well. Her first five choices were:
Man on Fire (not usually my kind of movie, but really sharp)
Catch Me If You Can (a great tale)
Minority Report (If I hadn’t seen it in the theater, it’d be a good choice.)
The Terminal (I didn’t love it, but I’m glad I saw it.)
Patch Adams (I didn’t love it, and I’m not glad I saw it.)
33 an entry in Wikipedia: Sadly, Honey’s edits to my Wikipedia entry were removed by stern Wikipedians who called them “nonsense” and “generally unencyclopedic.”
35 My team is good: Another reason I loved my outsourcers is that they could be forceful when called for. Theirs was an extremely polite and diplomatic variety of force, but still, very impressive. I remember wondering if an article I’d edited might be mentioned on the magazine’s cover. So Honey wrote to the art director: “If we add two lines of text about this sizzling scene, it would make the layout attractive. It might also serve as an ’eye-catcher.’ I’m sure you would like this idea. However, the entire decision does vest upon you.”
And finally, if you’re interested in outsourcing your own life, here are some options:
• GetFriday.com: This is the division of Your Man in India that was founded after the article came out. To sign up, you can e-mail [email protected]. Prices vary, but in one plan you pay ten dollars a month for the service, plus fifteen dollars an hour for the tasks.
• Brickwork: the company that employed Honey. You can reach them at [email protected]. Their website is www.b2kcorp.com/.
• If you want to work with a U.S.-based company, you can try Do My Stuff (www.DoMyStuff.com). This is sort of like a cross between Craigslist and eBay. You post a task, and assistants put in a bid to work on it. I’ve never used it myself, so I can’t vouch for its quality, but it’s an interesting idea.
CHAPTER 3: I THINK YOU’RE FAT
45 Ass Crack, Virginia: That’s a lie. I actually said “Butt Fuck, Virginia,” but the chapter was so obscenity-filled already, I censored myself on the page.
57 do not want to have a playdate: The fuller story—which I recounted in The Year of Living Biblically—is this:
Julie, Jasper, and I went to a local hot dog joint and sat next to another family.
“Julie Schoenberg?” asked the ponytailed mom.
It was an acquaintance Julie hadn’t seen since college. Hugs were exchanged, compliments toward babies extended, spouses introduced, mutual friends discussed.
At the end of the meal, we got our check, and Julie’s friend said, “We should all get together and have a playdate sometime.”
“Absolutely,” said Julie.
“Uh, I don’t know,” I said.
Julie’s friend laughed nervously, not sure what to make of that.
Julie glared at me.
“You guys seem nice,” I said. “But I don’t really want new friends right now. So I think I’ll take a pass.”
Brad Blanton talks about the scary thrill of total candor, the adrenaline rush. I felt that. I heard myself saying the words, but they seemed unreal, like I was in an off-Broadway production.
Julie was too angry to look in my direction.
“It’s just that I don’t have enough time to see our old friends, so I don’t want to overcommit,” I said, shrugging. Hoping to take the edge off, I added: “Just being honest.”
“Well, I’d love to see you,” said Julie. “A.J. can stay home.”
Julie’s friend pushed her stroller out of the restaurant, shooting a glance over her shoulder as she left.
CHAPTER 4: 240 MINUTES OF FAME
61 “You’re a clue”: I couldn’t figure out a way to search New York Times crossword puzzles, so “forty-eight down” is a guess. If anyone knows the real number, please let me know.
64 send me to the Oscars: I wasn’t the only Entertainment Weekly writer at the Oscars that year. When I worked there, EW got a handful of tickets for the reporters. One ticket went to me, another to Jessica Shaw, who acted as my publicist during the night. Jessica did double duty, actually getting quotes from nonfake celebrities.
67 Julia’s vanity production company: To be fair, Julia Roberts’s production company, called Shoelace Productions, did have partial involvement in producing a couple of movies, most notably Stepmom.
69 Would the actresses be willing: I’m still grateful and amazed my bosses at Entertainment Weekly allowed me to propose via the Sex and the City. It’s one reason I can be glad I didn’t work at The New Yorker. Would Seymour Hersh be allowed to ask Rahm Emanuel to make a video for his son’s bar mitzvah?
70 The headphones are tuned: My inadvertent eavesdropping on Kim Cattrall had a fictional parallel in the romantic comedy Notting Hill. Hugh Grant’s character visits Julia Roberts’s character on the set of her new movie, and hears her trash-talking him over his wireless headphones. Their story ended more happily than mine and Kim’s.
75 An opposing study argues: The alternate thesis—that narcissists flock to show business in the first place—can be found in the book The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America, by Dr. Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young. The authors came to their conclusion after questionnaires filled out by celebrities revealed they were huge narcissists even at the start of their careers. Reality stars were the most narcissistic, by the way. Musicians, the least.
CHAPTER 5: THE RATIONALITY PROJECT
78 But then I read a new book: The coauthor of Nudge, Cass Sunstein, is my first cousin, once removed. Which probably makes me irrationally biased toward him.
79 In the kitchen, I find Julie: Julie may be irrational sometimes, as we all are. But she can also be the most rational person I know. She had no qualms about taking a flight just three weeks after 9/11. I wouldn’t go within a mile of an airport. But in retrospect, she was more rational. The Black Swan has an interesting section on all the deaths caused by the increase in car traffic after 9/11.
85 an astounding number of superstitions: If you want to understand superstitions better, I’d recommend looking to B. F. Skinner’s pigeon trick. Skinner was the Harvard psychologist famous for two things: attempting to reduce almost all human behavior to stimulus and response, and raising his daughter in a laboratory box (the second is an urban legend).
I’m no Skinnerian behaviorist when it comes to humans, but I think his pigeon trick provides a helpful analogy to understanding superstitions, and the confirmation bias in general. I learned about it from Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, by Connecticut College professor Stuart A. Vyse.
Okay, here’s the trick:
Before a speech, Skinner would put a pigeon in a cage. The cage was rigged so that at regular intervals, without fail, a food pellet would drop down a chute into the cage. Nothing the pigeon did could make the food come slower or faster. It was all based on clockwo
rk. So Skinner would bring the cage into a lecture, then put a cloth over it and put the cage to the side. An hour later, he’d finish his speech and unveil the pigeon.
Invariably, the pigeon would be exhibiting some zany behavior. It’d be walking in circles. Or pecking furiously at the floor. Or bobbing its head like a white guy at a jazz club. See, the pigeon had come up with a cockamamie theory that its head bobbing had caused the food to drop. So it continued doing it, fueled by the confirmation fallacy.
My version of nutty pigeon behavior comes in many varieties: swallowing in pairs or repeatedly touching the faucet, for instance. Pretty much everyone I know engages in magical thinking, in this illusion of control. It’s just a matter of to what degree.
I called Vyse to talk to him about it. The exchange I remember best was this:
“I notice you say in the book that superstitious people are associated with lower intelligence.”
“It’s a very slight correlation,” he said.
“But it’s there?”
“Yes. But it’s very slight.”
To make me feel better, Vyse told me that at Harvard, there’s a statue of patron John Harvard, and there’s a superstition that you’ll get a good grade if you touch his left foot before an exam. “The foot is entirely worn off.”
CHAPTER 7: WHAT WOULD GEORGE WASHINGTON DO?
118 strange obsession with his compost pile: The John Adams manure fact is a reference to something I learned while reading the encyclopedia. As I said in The Know-It-All:“ . . . the strangest passage ever published in Britannica’s history is about John Adams, in the section on his retirement. It says he spent his time writing letters, ’enjoying his tankard of hard cider each morning before breakfast’ and ’rejoicing at the size of his manure pile.’ Now, it’s moderately strange that the second president of the United States was sloshed before breakfast. But that he derived joy from the size of a pile of excrement? I just don’t know how to interpret that. It occurs to me, though, that this might make for a nice monument to this American hero—a marble replica of his twenty-foot-high manure collection. Take that, Mount Rushmore!”
127 I’m doing my best to walk around New York like George Washington: I should mention that, unlike my biblical year, when I wandered the Upper West Side in a robe and sandals, I didn’t spend a lot of time sporting a tricornered hat. I only did it once, for the photo that appears at the start of this chapter. I expected that going out in public in my Colonial costume to be an afternoon of jeers, mockery, and agape mouths. But it was actually quite pleasant. The most memorable feedback I got was to be saluted by two different strangers. New Yorkers respect our Founding Fathers. (The outfit—rented from Creative Costume Company in mid-town New York—was also really comfortable, perhaps because of the elastic waistband, which may not have been totally authentic.)
Incidentally, attire wasn’t a minor thing to Washington. He wasn’t exactly a dandy, despite the fact that he owned yellow gloves. Dandyism would violate Rule 54: “Play not the peacock, looking every where about you, to see if you be well decked . . .”
But it’s fair to say he was preoccupied with external appearances. He knew the clothes can make the man. Washington designed his own outfits, as Burns and Dunn point out, right on down to the “width of lapels and placement of all 12 buttons.”
And he was the only one who showed up to the Second Continental Congress decked out in his military uniform. Which meant that when it came time to appoint the commander of the military, well, Washington was already dressed for the occasion. As Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock says: “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”
CHAPTER 8: THE UNITASKER
151 Multitasking costs the economy $650 billion a year, according to the Institute of Pulling Numbers Out of Its Ass: Actually it’s from Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at a business research firm called Basex, as quoted in Walter Kirn’s Atlantic article.
174 Nietzche’s writing changed: The observation about how Nietzsche’s writing style changed after he started using a typewriter is from “Is Google Making Us Stupid” in the Atlantic. Thanks to Google for that one.
176 “Daddy! Daddy!” “Can’t talk now,” I responded: In The Year of Living Biblically, I mentioned that when he was two years old, Jasper was behind the curve, vocabulary-wise. For the record—and in case Jasper ever reads my books—I want to say that he’s now fully caught up and speaks like a young William F. Buckley Jr.
CHAPTER 9: WHIPPED
193 just about twice a week, according to several recent surveys: It’s actually a complicated question—the one about how often married couples have sex. It differs according to age, health, and country. More information can be found here: http://family.jrank.org/pages/1102/Marital-Sex-Sexual-Frequency.html.
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CHAPTER 3: I THINK YOU’RE FAT
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CHAPTER 4: 240 MINUTES OF FAME
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CHAPTER 5: THE RATIONALITY PROJECT
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CHAPTER 7: WHAT WOULD GEORGE WASHINGTON DO?
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CHAPTER 8: THE UNITASKER
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