“I can’t help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the...”
Work
After many years as an entertainment journalist, A J Jacobs became increasingly concerned at the massive and humiliating gaps in his general knowledge - plenty on Britney, Eminem and Catherine Zeta Jones, but scarily little on Beethoven, Einstein or Goethe. Many of us feel that way as college becomes ever more distant, but Jacobs' unique response was to set for himself a suitably daunting, and some might say insane, task: to fill the holes in his education by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All of it. From beginning to end... Operation Encyclopaedia tests the outer limits of Jacobs's stamina, illuminates the value of wisdom over facts, and explores the real meaning of intelligence, as he endeavours to join Mensa, get onto Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and absorb - and try to remember - 33,000 pages of information and learning.
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A. J. Jacobs
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