Why writer AJ Jacobs took up his quill to live like a Founding Father

The next best thing to a time machine, says A.J. Jacobs, is a wardrobe change. Dressing and acting like someone from another era subtly alters how you think and see the world, he explains: “The outer affects the inner.”

So, when Mr. Jacobs authored “The Year of Living Biblically,” a bestselling book about trying to obey every rule in the Old and New Testaments, he grew a bushy, Karl Marx-style beard (per instructions in Leviticus) and roamed the streets of New York in a flowing robe and sandals. 

Likewise, for his newest project, “The Year of Living Constitutionally,” he donned a tricorne hat, lugged a musket around town, and shunned electricity in favor of reading by candlelight and writing with a goose quill pen. The goal was to climb inside the heads of America’s Founding Fathers and explore the logic of basing today’s Supreme Court rulings on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.

Mr. Jacobs practices a modern form of “stunt journalism,” in which the reporter directly participates in a story instead of merely observing it. “I like to understand things by living them,” he says. Immersion journalism, as it is also called, dates to the 1800s in the U.S.

Although Mr. Jacobs didn’t invent the genre, he has put his own stamp on it.

“He uses immersive experiments not just for spectacle, but to explore deeper truths about human behavior and societal norms,” says Peter McGraw, a humor researcher and professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. “His work brings comedy and insight together, making complex topics accessible and engaging.” 

Nonetheless, understanding things by living them is easier said than done when attempting to conjure the late 1700s from an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As one historian warned him, “The past is another country. It’s like trying to get inside the mind of a mollusk.”

Undaunted, Mr. Jacobs plunged ahead in frequently comic fashion, chronicling his efforts with a blend of humor, fascinating facts, and quirky trivia: In the nation’s formative years, before settling on the title of “president,” officials considered “His Highness,” “His Excellency,” and even “Washington,” in the same way “czar” derives from Julius Caesar.

Courtesy of AJ Jacobs

A.J. Jacobs poses on the steps of the Capitol in Washington in 2023. He says he visited Congress to petition for redress of grievances, as is his First Amendment right. He’s wearing a tricorne and regimental coat, which was hand-stitched.

Marinating in the Bible and the Constitution – along with other lifestyle experiments – produced surprising aftereffects, Mr. Jacobs says. Most are positive, but there’s a caveat. Playing a role 24/7 sometimes drives his wife and three sons bonkers.

“Every dad is embarrassing to his children,” Mr. Jacobs notes, “but I’m embarrassing on a different level.”

Why become a “human guinea pig”?

A La-Z-Boy recliner sparked his transformation into a self-described “human guinea pig.”

In 1990, after earning a philosophy degree at Brown University and realizing that “no Fortune 500 firms were hiring in-house philosophers,” he turned to journalism, landing at Entertainment Weekly.

There, he penned an article about spending 24 hours aboard a turbocharged chair equipped with built-in telephone, beverage compartment, massager, and answering machine. “I thought maybe I could put myself in other unusual situations or experiments,” Mr. Jacobs recalls thinking. A few years later, that eureka moment germinated into “The Know-It-All,” an 18-month quest to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and become “the smartest person in the world.” The book cracked bestseller lists, but – in a portent of future family resistance – Mr. Jacobs’ wife began fining him $1 every time he injected an “irrelevant fact” into conversations.

So began a steady stream of off-the-wall exploits, such as trying to live without plastic for 24 hours or outsourcing his life (including arguments with his spouse and reading bedtime stories to his kids) to India.

From Nellie Bly to George Plimpton

Stunt journalism has a long history in the U.S. In 1887, Nellie Bly had herself committed to what was then called an insane asylum and wrote about the nightmarish conditions for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World newspaper. On a lighter note, inspired by Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in Eighty Days,” she circled the globe in 72 days while filing dispatches along the way.

More recently, George Plimpton posed as a quarterback trying out for the Detroit Lions, and turned it into a book. He followed that with stints as a circus acrobat and symphony musician.

Mr. Jacobs, who read Mr. Plimpton in high school, continues that tradition.

To prepare for “The Year of Living Constitutionally,” Mr. Jacobs spent three months devouring history books and consulting legal experts of all stripes, including one who was “so originalist he refuses to capitalize the word supreme in Supreme Court” because it’s lowercase in the Constitution.

Once underway, Mr. Jacobs dined with ye olde two-pronged forks (a culinary disaster, he says), wore garters to hold up his elastic-free woolen stockings, and splattered so much quill ink (which is made from the nests of wasp larvae) that “my clothes started to look like a Jackson Pollock painting.”

Courtesy of AJ Jacobs

A.J. Jacobs writes his book by candlelight in his New York apartment with a goose quill and black ink made from wasp nests, in 2023, wearing a wool tricorne hat.

There were several concessions to modern times. To visit a Revolutionary War reenactment in New Jersey, he drove a car. (“It’s hard to find a place that rents horses for interstate travel,” he quips.) And he ordered much of his garb online. Also, even though the 16th Amendment – which ushered in the federal income tax – didn’t pass until 1909, Mr. Jacobs happily deducted the cost of his musket and other accoutrements as business expenses.

Some of his attempts to revive 18th-century rituals, such as voting aloud on Election Day instead of by secret ballot, played like “Candid Camera” pranks, drawing astonished reactions. The funniest was when he met with Rep. Ro Khanna of California. Mr. Jacobs formally applied – under an obscure passage in the Constitution – to have Congress deputize him as a pirate so he could commandeer a water-ski boat to seize enemy vessels, a practice that helped colonists defeat the British. 

“Wow,” Representative Khanna reportedly replied. “We will look into this.”

Throughout the book, Mr. Jacobs uses such antics to examine how America’s founding document was interpreted in the 1780s versus now. Free speech, for example, was originally reined in by bans on blasphemy, cussing, and even certain theater performances. And the First Amendment’s sanction against establishing an official religion applied only to the federal government, not states.

“This project made me grateful for democracy,” Mr. Jacobs reports, “and for modern forks.” Today, he still writes by quill, saying the slower process encourages more thoughtfulness. And though he no longer reads Ben Franklin’s twice-weekly 1790 newspaper, he decided to stick with that era’s reduced media diet because the current “firehose of negative news” undermines mental health.

Meanwhile, his family is happy to have everyone in the household living in the same century again. Jasper, the oldest son, enjoyed his dad’s costumed escapades, likening them to “performance art.” But his twin teenage brothers felt mortified. In public, “they wouldn’t let me wear my tricorne hat within 50 yards of them,” Mr. Jacobs says.

The 18th-century props also jangled his wife’s nerves on occasion. She outlawed the scratch-scratch-scratch of the quill in her presence. And she nixed the burning of beef tallow candles in the apartment, saying they reeked of “unrefrigerated meat loaf.” Mr. Jacobs switched to beeswax.

“My wife would tell you I go overboard,” he acknowledges. 

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 might be next. “She was a constitutional widow,” he says. “So I’m taking a quick respite.”