The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  When we’re on the phone, I tell my father about the aspirin habit. He’s not opposed, but suggests I should consult Dr. Mackin.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  But I won’t. And the main reason I won’t is that the Britannica has systematically, relentlessly eroded my faith in the authority of doctors. That’s what will happen when you read about page after page of bloody and bloody ridiculous medical history. I knew about leeches and bodily humors, but that’s just the start. I’m still unsettled by trepanning—the primitive practice of drilling a two-inch hole in the skull to let out the evil spirit. I’m sure during the heyday of trepanning, the chief resident for trepanning at Lascaux Grotto Hospital was very authoritative and assured his patients in a condescending tone not to worry about a thing. We’re professionals here, he said, as he smashed their skull with a rock.

  Okay, so that’s too easy. But medical history in the postscientific age isn’t much more heartening. Here’s a quote that took me aback: “I believe firmly that more patients have died from the use of [surgical] gloves than have been saved from infection by their use.” That’s from one of the leading medical experts in the early 20th century weighing in on the surgical glove controversy—a controversy I didn’t even know existed. In my encyclopedia, I wrote a little note in ballpoint pen next to that quotation: “Doctors don’t know shit.”

  That was an overreaction, of course. They do know a little shit. I do believe in science and double-blind studies. But I also have much less faith in the infallibility of these self-aggrandizing guys with diplomas on their wall. Plus, I can feel myself getting a little cocky. I’ve read about medicine, so I know this stuff too, right?

  Cocky, that’s the word. In the last few weeks I’m not sure where, maybe the late Os—I started to feel my ego expand. I started to feel secure. I realized this when I did a little gedankenexperiment—a thought experiment. I imagined myself at a dinner with such established big brains as Salman Rushdie and Stephen Hawking, and I could see myself holding my own. (The good part is that I will never actually find myself at such a dinner, so there’s no way to disprove my thesis.)

  The thing is, I don’t feel intellectually adrift as I used to. I feel that I have a handle on the map of all knowledge—and even if there are some details missing, I at least have the outlines of the continents and islands. When I go to meetings at Esquire, I’ve got this bedrock of confidence that wasn’t there pre-Britannica. Sure, they may talk about the football game I know nothing about, with names of Jets and Falcons that I couldn’t spell. But for every running back I’ve never heard of, I’ve got a handful of Portuguese explorers or Parisian archbishops or whatever in my mental pocket. I know they’re there if I need them.

  Rice, Dan

  We all know the cliché—politicians are a bunch of clowns. Well, here we have an actual, bona fide clown/politician. Dan Rice was perhaps the most famous clown of the 19th century. He started his circus career, says the Britannica, when he bought a half interest in a trained pig. He then switched over to a short stint as a strongman before settling on clowning and horse tricks. The 1860s were Rice’s glory days, the decade when he toured the country for a then amazing salary of $1,000 a week (not so far from my own, salary, come to think of it), recognized by his trademark white beard. He got so popular, President Zachary Taylor made him an honorary colonel. And here’s my favorite part: in 1868, he ran for the Republican nomination for president. He didn’t win, which is sad. I would have liked to read history textbooks about the Pie in the Face Incident involving the French ambassador.

  riot

  You only need three rambunctious people to legally qualify as a riot. That’s all. So Julie, our kid, and I could hold our very own riot.

  Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène

  Robert-Houdin was a French conjurer, the founder of modern magic—a man so revered that a Jewish kid in Wisconsin renamed himself Houdini in his honor. My favorite Robert-Houdin fact: in 1856, the French government sent him to Algeria to combat the influence of the mystical dervishes by duplicating their feats. I like the idea of magicians being called into war service. Maybe we should have air-dropped David Blaine into Iraq. A really dangerous part of Iraq. A minefield, perhaps.

  Robespierre

  Out to lunch with Dad again, one of our semiregular workingman meals at a midtown deli. Dad is already seated when I get to the restaurant, chewing on one of the complimentary pickles they leave in a bowl on the table.

  “Be careful of that. Pickles have been linked to stomach cancer,” I say. “Pickled foods and salt both increase your chances of gastric cancer.” I’m not really concerned about my father’s health, which would have been nice. I’m just trying to show off.

  “I’ll only have half,” my dad says.

  “Also, Jewish women after menstruating are forbidden to touch pickles.”

  As soon as I said that one, I wished I could take it back. That is just a rule of life, along with “shower every day” and “wear sunscreen”: Do not discuss menstruation with your father.

  Luckily, Dad kind of ignores me. Which is better for both of us.

  “So I’ve been reading about your profession,” I say.

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, they had a nice section on lawyers in the Britannica. Did you know that Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Lenin, and Robespierre were all lawyers?”

  “A lovely group of people,” says my dad.

  Sometime before our sandwiches arrive, my dad spots a colleague across the dining room—a man I’ve never met. He asks me to go up to the guy’s table and say, “Hi, Barry,” to see the reaction.

  I feel even more uncomfortable than when I brought up the Jewish menstruation taboo. I just can’t do it. Dad looks disappointed.

  rock tripe

  A monthly story meeting at Esquire. It’s five of us in the conference room, with the editor in chief, Granger, at the head of the table, taking occasional notes.

  My fellow editor Brendan is pitching a story about living “off the grid,” away from civilization.

  “Getting your own generator is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Brendan.

  “Actually, the tip of the iceberg can be pretty large,” I offer.

  “What?”

  “A tip of the iceberg doesn’t have to be small. In some iceberg formations, fully half of the iceberg is above water. So it’s not a very accurate cliché.”

  Brendan thanks me with a glare, then finishes his pitch by talking about solar energy. Granger likes it, as evidenced by his scribbling pen.

  A few seconds of silence follow, so I figure maybe I’ll jump in now.

  “I’ve got a good one,” I say.

  Granger’s listening.

  “I think we should do something on an unsung hero of our country,” I pause dramatically, then: “Lichen.”

  “The fungus thing?”

  “Part fungus, part algae, and all-American.”

  The faces of my colleagues indicate that they don’t quite follow. So I explain: George Washington’s starving troops ate lichen off the rocks at Valley Forge. Lichen saved our country. If it weren’t for lichen—or more specifically rock tripe, a type of lichen—we’d all be playing cricket.

  Someone says that they actually think we should bolster our coverage of ferns instead. Everyone laughs. Someone else says that nothing can beat Norman Mailer’s article on peat moss.

  And on it went. Back in the safety of my office, I give lichen some more thought. I honestly don’t think it would make a bad article. Everyone likes an unsung hero. Granger’s always asking us for ideas that haven’t been done before, and I can almost guarantee GQ hasn’t scooped us on lichen.

  Originally I was thinking big—a two-page spread on lichen, a list of its other uses (perfumes, litmus, food dyes), a lichen recipe, the top ten varieties of lichen, a celebrity lichen angle that I hadn’t quite figured out yet. But after the reception at the meeting, I’d settle for a little box. I e-mailed Granger restating my case.
Just a little box, I say.

  He e-mails me back: “Fine.”

  After two years at Esquire, I’ve mastered Granger’s e-mail code. “Great” means he loves an idea. “Okay” means he likes it. “Sure” means he couldn’t care less. And “fine” means he hates it, but he’ll let you do it to shut you up.

  A few days later, I have written up a little salute to lichen and squeezed it on the bottom of a page. I’ve even had the art department call in a lichen photo. Let’s just say it’s not quite as attractive as Penelope Cruz. It looks not unlike a skin ailment. But it’s a proud moment—lichen is getting its due. When the article comes out, lichen will take its place next to Paul Revere and the guy with the fife as a Revolutionary War hero. I love when my knowledge has an impact on the outside world.

  rodeo

  The inventor of steer wrestling was an African-American cowboy named Bill Pickett. He would tussle a steer to the ground and bite the steer’s upper lip in a “bulldog grip.” Jesus. Makes rodeos today look like PETA conventions.

  Rubens, Peter Paul

  This much I knew about Rubens: the adjective “Rubenesque” may sound smart, but it’s something to avoid when trying to compliment a date. The Britannica had a little more for me. I learned that Rubens, the 17th-century Flemish painter, was prolific and inventive, his style partly influenced by our old friend Caravaggio. But their similarities end with their work. In his personal life, Rubens is the anti-Caravaggio. As the Britannica puts it: “The father of eight children—this prosperous, energetic, thoroughly balanced man presents the antithesis of the modern notion of struggling artist.” Yes! That’s comforting. Rubens will be my role model. Now I know: I don’t have to yell and scream and throw artichokes at waiters to qualify as an artistic genius. I don’t have to kill a man on a tennis court. So forget the tantrums. I just need some talent.

  S

  Sabbatarians

  MY GOD, I’M exhausted. I keep thinking about that scene in Cool Hand Luke in which Paul Newman shoves hard-boiled egg after hard-boiled egg into his mouth. I think I know how he felt after that forty-third egg. Same way I felt after I ingested that twenty-seventh Lithuanian poet.

  And now I’m confronted with S. The killer. At 2,089 pages, the single longest letter in the Britannica. It’s like Heartbreak Hill in the Boston marathon. I look at the S volumes on my mustard-colored bookshelf. So silent, so thick, so smug. I take a deep breath and I march ahead into the Ss, right into the Sabbatarians—a term sometimes applied to Christians who believe the weekly holy day should be Saturday rather than Sunday. For me, neither Saturday nor Sunday this week will be a day of rest. It will be a day of Ss.

  Saint Elias Mountains

  The Saint Elias Mountains are a mountain range I already know depressingly well, having seen them up close for far too long. When I was growing up, my parents took my sister and me on a trip every summer. They wanted to show us the world, and they did such a thorough job, I now feel happy to do any additional traveling by watching the Discovery Channel, much to Julie’s dismay.

  But anyway, when I was a freshman in high school, my parents took us on a trip to Alaska, where we visited Glacier Bay National Park, bordered by the Saint Elias Mountains.

  It’s a huge park—five thousand square miles—about four thousand times the size of Central Park, though without as many Rollerbladers or drug dealers. And it’s spectacular, even for someone like me, who, as Woody Allen says, is at two with nature.

  One afternoon, my sister and I rented a kayak (a craft, by the way, that was invented by Greenland’s Eskimos and was originally made of sealskin over a whalebone frame). The man who rented it to us looked harmless enough, if overly familiar with the workings of a bong. My sister and I paddled out into the glorious bay—oohing and ahhing at the mountains and the seals that poked their noses out of the water. We saw no one else—no other kayakers, no campers, nothing to indicate humans existed at all. Just wilderness. And then, as planned, half an hour later, we started to paddle back. Problem was, we seemed to have made a wrong turn. The place where there was once a channel of water had now become a beach. (We found out later that the bong-loving kayak rental guy had forgotten to mention that the low tides would drain our channel.)

  So Beryl and I just made a right turn and started paddling, figuring we’d find a way back eventually. Not the best philosophy, but our navigation skills weren’t honed to a sharp edge, seeing as going from Eighty-first to Seventy-sixth Street doesn’t generally require a compass.

  We paddled and paddled some more. We passed the minutes singing TV theme songs—Diff’rent Strokes, Brady Bunch. We started on Gilligan’s Island, but decided that a song about an ill-fated nautical adventure was too appropriate, so we stopped. We talked about which of our classmates might be most upset by our deaths. I liked to imagine that Rachel Yassky might throw herself on my coffin and have to be dragged off. That was a nice thought.

  After an hour or two, we ran out of songs and conversation, so the only sound was the paddles splashing in the water. That, and the occasional howl of an unidentified but no doubt ferociously carnivorous animal.

  We didn’t want to go on land alone. The hotel owner had told us an unpleasant story that had effectively removed that option. I can’t remember the details now, but it involved a grizzly bear, a pack of butterscotch Life Savers, and a detached torso. It got cold. And dark. And it started to rain. We were scared—though not overly so. Maybe it was New York overconfidence, but we weren’t panicked.

  Our parents, back on land, were making up for our panic deficit. They were terrified. Because it was now night, the park rangers couldn’t send out search planes till morning. Worse, the rangers let slip that if Beryl and I kept paddling, we would freeze to death. So my parents had to stay up wondering if they had kids anymore.

  At about 1 A.M., Beryl and I heard something over the sound of our chattering teeth. Men laughing. We shouted. They shouted back. We paddled toward their voices. We found out later they were the only campers in hundreds of square miles. They were nice men, up from California to relax and fill their lungs with fresh air. The first question they asked us was, “You got any cigarettes?” Beryl and I got a decent night’s sleep—the California men lent us a nice dry tent and assuaged our worry about the bears—and we awoke to the sound of the search-and-rescue seaplane buzzing overhead.

  I still remember the look on my dad’s face when he stepped off the plane and saw me and my sister. It flooded with relief. I’m not just throwing that phrase around—I could see the relief wash over his face.

  That night shook my dad up good. You can joke with him about most things, but not that night. I think it changed him, too. He liked having us nearby before then, but after that, he became obsessed with physical proximity. Nothing pleases him more than having us in the room, watching TV, even if no one’s allowed to talk except for those fifteen seconds when we’re fast-forwarding through commercials. After that, he wrote me a note so uncharacteristically earnest and emotional, a note all about how proud he was of me, that I can’t even think about it without tearing up.

  In any case, I bring all this up because I’m starting to get a glimmer of what it felt like for Dad. Julie had cramps the other day, and it freaked me out. I would put that in capitals and italics with a couple exclamation points, but you get the idea. I’ve been a worrier my whole life. This, however, was a whole new level, a quantitatively different type of distress. Thankfully, Julie turned out to be fine, but I’m starting to understand the man in a Slavic folktale who plucked out his eyeballs for fear he might inadvertently give his children the evil eye.

  Salieri, Antonio

  Here’s the flipside of Thomas Paine. History has given Paine a big fat wet kiss, but poor Salieri has gotten a drive by. What’d he do to deserve his status as the embodiment of mediocrity? Not much. In his day, the Britannica says, he was a respected composer, even a revered one. And far from despising Mozart, he was a Wolfgang friend.

  Unfortunatel
y, a man named Rimsky-Korsakov thought it’d be fun to write an opera called Mozart et Salieri (1898)—based on no historical evidence—in which Salieri is eaten up by jealousy and poisons Mozart. Then a few decades later, the play with the same theme. Yeah, artistic license and all that. But what about poor innocent Salieri? Just doesn’t seem fair.

  Sartre

  Here he is, the author of Nausea. The man who practically accused me of pedophilia. I scan the entry for weaknesses and find that Sartre was cross-eyed. First Descartes and his fetish, now this. I’ve got to ask: what is it with French philosophy and crossed eyes?

  Schmeling, Max

  I knew about Schmeling—the Aryan boxer, Hitler’s champion in the ring, the Great Nazi Hope. A real villain. Or so I thought. After reading Schmeling’s life history, I’m not so sure. I’m not going to name my kid Schmeling Jacobs, but I also don’t think he’s the soulless incarnation of evil. The Britannica does that a lot. You realize that, yes, there are a few black-or-white hats in history, but most are somewhere in the charcoal or slate range.

  Schmeling gained fame from his bout with Joe Louis in 1936. Schmeling was clever. Before the fight, he studied slow-motion films of Louis and found a weakness—Louis always dropped his guard after delivering a series of left jabs. Thanks to that information, Schmeling knocked Louis out. By the time of the rematch in 1938, Joe fixed his bad habit and flattened Schmeling—dealing a nice blow to Aryan propaganda.

  But here’s the odd part: the man touted as the Aryan boxer “openly associated with Jews,” had a trainer who was Jewish, and shielded two Jewish boys in his Berlin apartment during Kristallnacht. His refusal to abandon Jewish friends got him in trouble with the Nazi regime. Instead of giving him favored treatment like other celebrities, they assigned Schmeling to the dangerous parachute forces, where he was injured in 1941.

  After the war, Schmeling briefly returned to boxing, then opened a Coca-Cola franchise in Germany. Later, he gave financial aid to the widow of his former nemesis, Joe Louis. So there you go: he’s not about to be sainted—he did fight for the Nazis—but he also shielded Jews and helped out Joe Louis’s widow.