For his latest project, “The Year of Constitutional Living,” journalist AJ Jacobs donned a tricorn hat, lugged a rifle around town, and eschewed electricity in favor of reading by candlelight and writing with a goose quill. The goal was to look inside the minds of America’s Founding Fathers and explore the logic behind the originalist interpretation of the Constitution that underpins today’s Supreme Court rulings.
Mr Jacobs practices a modern form of “stunt journalism,” in which the reporter directly participates in a story rather than just observing it. “I want to understand things by experiencing them,” he says. Immersion journalism, as it is also called, dates back to the 19th century in the United States
Why we wrote this
A story about
Can a combination of humor and immersive experiments offer insights into history and our own times? In The Year of Living Constitutionally, author AJ Jacobs seeks to understand the Supreme Court’s theory of originalism.
Although Mr. Jacobs did not invent the genre, he put his own stamp on it.
“He uses immersive experiments not just to provide spectacle, but to explore deeper truths about human behavior and societal norms,” says Peter McGraw, humor researcher and professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. “His work brings together comedy and insight, making complex topics accessible and engaging.”
The next best thing to a time machine, says AJ Jacobs, is a wardrobe change. Dressing and behaving like someone from another time subtly changes how you think and see the world, he explains: “The outside affects the inside.”
When Mr. Jacobs wrote “The Year of Living Biblically,” a best-seller about trying to follow every rule of the Old and New Testaments, he grew a bushy Karl Marx-style beard (following instructions in the book of Leviticus) and strolled the streets of New York in a flowing robe and sandals.
For his latest project, “The Year of Living Constitutionally,” he donned a tricorn hat, lugged a rifle around town, and eschewed electricity in favor of reading by candlelight and writing with a goose quill. The goal was to look into the minds of America’s Founding Fathers and explore the logic behind the originalist interpretation of the Constitution that underpins today’s Supreme Court rulings.
Why we wrote this
A story about
Can a combination of humor and immersive experiments offer insights into history and our own times? In The Year of Living Constitutionally, author AJ Jacobs seeks to understand the Supreme Court’s theory of originalism.
Mr Jacobs practices a modern form of “stunt journalism,” in which the reporter directly participates in a story rather than just observing it. “I want to understand things by experiencing them,” he says. Immersion journalism, as it is also called, dates back to the 19th century in the United States
Although Mr. Jacobs did not invent the genre, he put his own stamp on it.
“He uses immersive experiments not just to provide spectacle, but to explore deeper truths about human behavior and societal norms,” says Peter McGraw, humor researcher and professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. “His work brings together comedy and insight, making complex topics accessible and engaging.”
Still, trying to conjure up the late 18th century from an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is easier said than done, understanding things by experiencing them. As one historian warned him, “The past is another country. It’s like trying to get into the mind of a mollusk.”
Undaunted, Jacobs threw himself into the work in often comical ways, documenting his efforts with a mix of humor, fascinating facts, and quirky concerns: In the nation’s formative years, before the title “president” was agreed upon, officials thought of “His Highness,” “His Excellency,” or even “Washington,” just as the word “Czar” is derived from Julius Caesar.
Immersing himself in the Bible and the Constitution — along with other lifestyle experiments — has produced surprising aftereffects, Jacobs says. Most are positive, but there is one caveat. Playing a role 24/7 sometimes drives his wife and three sons crazy.
“Every father is embarrassed by his children,” notes Mr Jacobs, “but I am embarrassed on a different level.”
Why become a “human guinea pig”?
A La-Z-Boy chair triggered his transformation into a self-proclaimed “human guinea pig.”
In 1990, after graduating from Brown University with a degree in philosophy and realizing that “none of the Fortune 500 companies hired their own philosophers,” he turned to journalism and landed a job at Entertainment Weekly.
There he wrote an article about spending 24 hours in a turbo chair equipped with a built-in phone, drinks compartment, massager and answering machine. “I thought maybe I could put myself in other unusual situations or conduct experiments,” Jacobs recalls. A few years later, that eureka moment led to The Know-It-All, an 18-month endeavor to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and become “the smartest person in the world.” The book stormed the bestseller lists, but – in a portent of later family resistance – Jacobs’ wife began to fine him a dollar every time he dropped an “irrelevant fact” into conversation.
Thus began a steady series of crazy exploits, such as attempting to live without plastic for 24 hours or outsourcing his life (including arguments with his wife and reading bedtime stories to his children) to India.
From Nellie Bly to George Plimpton
Stunt journalism has a long tradition in the USA. In 1887, Nellie Bly had herself committed to what was then known as an insane asylum and wrote about the nightmarish conditions for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, the New York World. Inspired by Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in 80 Days”, she circumnavigated the globe in 72 days and wrote reports along the way.
George Plimpton recently made a book out of his impersonation of a quarterback at a Detroit Lions tryout, followed by performances as a circus acrobat and symphony musician.
Mr. Jacobs, who read Mr. Plimpton in high school, continues this tradition.
To prepare for the “Year of Living After the Constitution,” Jacobs spent three months devouring history books and consulting legal experts of all stripes, including one who was “such an originalist that he refused to capitalize the word ‘Supreme’ in ‘Supreme Court'” because it is lowercase in the Constitution.
On the road, Mr. Jacobs ate his dinner with good old two-pronged forks (a culinary disaster, he says), wore garters to hold his woolen stockings together without elastic, and splashed so much feather ink (which is extracted from the nests of wasp larvae) that “my clothes started to look like a Jackson Pollock painting.”
There were several concessions to modern times. To visit a Revolutionary War reenactment in New Jersey, he drove. (“It’s hard to find a place that rents horses for interstate travel,” he jokes.) And he ordered much of his clothing online. And although the 16th Amendment – which created the federal income tax – wasn’t passed until 1909, Mr. Jacobs was happy to write off the cost of his rifle and other equipment as a business expense.
Some of his attempts to revive 18th-century rituals, such as voting aloud on election day instead of a secret ballot, seemed like “hidden camera” pranks and drew astonished reactions. The funniest was his meeting with California Rep. Ro Khanna. Jacobs formally requested – citing an obscure passage in the Constitution – that Congress appoint him as an assistant pirate so he could hijack a water ski boat and capture enemy ships, a practice that helped the colonists defeat the British.
“Wow,” Rep. Khanna reportedly replied. “We’ll look into it.”
Throughout the book, Mr. Jacobs uses such antics to examine how America’s founding document was interpreted in the 1780s compared to today. Free speech, for example, was originally restricted by bans on blasphemy, swearing and even certain theatrical performances. And the First Amendment’s sanction against establishing an official religion applied only to the federal government, not the states.
“This project made me grateful for democracy,” Jacobs says, “and for modern forks.” Today, he still writes with a pen, saying the slower process encourages more thoughtfulness. And although he no longer reads Ben Franklin’s twice-weekly newspaper of 1790, he chose to stick with that era’s stripped-down media diet because the current “flood of negative news” undermines mental health.
Now his family is happy that everyone in the household is back in the same century. Jasper, the eldest son, enjoyed his father’s costume escapades, comparing them to “performance art.” His teenage twin brothers, on the other hand, were mortified. In public, “they wouldn’t let me wear my tricorn hat within 50 yards,” Jacobs says.
The 18th century props also occasionally got on his wife’s nerves. She forbade the pen to be scratched in her presence. And she forbade the burning of suet candles in the apartment because they smelled like “uncooled meatloaf”. Mr Jacobs switched to beeswax.
“My wife would say I’m exaggerating,” he admits.
In this case, the immersion was so intense that she advised Mr Jacobs to take a six-month break before turning himself into a Viking or whatever was next. “She was a constitutional widow,” he says. “So I’m taking a short break.”
