The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  Stalin, Joseph

  If there’s one ironclad rule I’ve learned about government, it’s this: never trust a politician with the nickname “Uncle.” You’ve got Uncle Joe Stalin, who won’t be receiving saint status anytime soon. There’s Ho Chi Minh, whose nickname was Uncle Ho. And for the trifecta, you’ve got Paul Kruger, the founder of South Africa’s nefarious Afrikaaner nation, also known as Uncle Paul. So if you see an uncle on the ballot, do not be tempted to vote for him. He is not actually your uncle. He will not tell you funny jokes and pull nickels out of your ear. Instead, he may try to have you purged. Just to be safe, stay away from politicians named Papa as well.

  Star-Spangled Banner, The

  Francis Scott Key’s poem was originally called “The Defence of Fort M’Henry.” Not quite as catchy. Also, the melody was taken from a British drinking song. Which is odd, since Key wrote it during the War of 1812 against … the British. First rounders, now this. We love to steal our most patriotic things from our former enemies.

  Stravinsky, Igor

  I actually knew about Stravinsky very early on in my life. I was about twelve. I was taking piano lessons from a Denise, a nice, frizzy-haired, thirty-something bachelorette who would come to our apartment to teach me Für Elise, Bach’s variations, and, to keep me interested, the theme from Star Wars. Despite the minor point that I showed no musical talent whatsover, I somehow decided I needed to take it to the next level. I needed to become a composer.

  So one week, I spent hours every afternoon plonking around on the piano in our foyer, scribbling down notes, erasing, scribbling some more. Finally, on Friday, Denise came, and I played my opus for her. It sounded like a combination of a traffic jam on Madison Avenue, a fax machine, and weasels in heat.

  “Good for you, A.J,” she said. “You’re experimenting in atonal compositions.”

  “Yes, I’m very interested in atonal compositions.” Of course, I had no idea what atonal compositions were; in fact, I was trying desperately to write tonal compositions. It’s just that my ear was 100 percent tin.

  “It reminds me of Stravinsky,” she said.

  “Ah yes, Stravinsky,” I replied, nodding my head. Denise was being exceedingly nice. She didn’t want to discourage me, but the only way it could have reminded her of Stravinsky is if Stravinsky had accidentally sat on the keyboard.

  That’s how I first learned of the Russian master. Then, in college, I expanded my knowledge of Stravinsky by four words: The Rites of Spring. An atonal composer who wrote The Rites of Spring. So that’s about where I stood.

  From the Britannica, I learned two important things. First, it’s The Rite of Spring. Only one rite. So I’d been sounding like a jackass all these years when I made the occasional allusion to Stravinsky (and sadly, I had made an occasional allusion). Second, The Rite of Spring was enough to cause an “opening-night riot” when it debuted at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées on May 29, 1913.

  Stravinsky’s score—with its “scandalous dissonances and rhythmic brutality”—caused an uproar among the chic Paris audience. The commotion was so loud, the ballet dancers couldn’t hear the orchestra in the nearby pit. But the dancers kept dancing anyway, urged on by the choreographer, who stood on a chair in the wings, shouting and miming the rhythm.

  I love this. I can’t believe that less than a century ago, a ballet with some discordant notes could cause an actual riot. (If they heard my composition, by the way, they would have burned the theater down.) Nowadays, audience members at the ballet rarely riot. They are often too busy falling asleep. Or if they are really upset, they leave after the first act to get a nice pasta dinner somewhere. But they don’t riot.

  It makes me feel nostalgic for when you could shock people with art. It was so easy back then. A couple of notes too close on the scale, a little sex, and presto, outrage! Now, good luck shocking the audience. You go to the movies and watch teenagers having sex with parakeets or whatever, and you just won’t be treated to an uproar, a commotion, or even a man standing on a chair. Being a true artist used to be a lot easier, not counting that tuberculosis business.

  stuttering

  I will not overcorrect my child. That’s a promise. “Stuttering tends to appear when a child’s parents anxiously overreact to normal pauses and repetition—which may also explain the tendency of the stutterer to be an only child or to have no siblings close in age.”

  That’s some solid parenting advice, which is good, because the creature inside Julie is becoming more and more human.

  Yesterday, Julie and I were at Mount Sinai Hospital to get an ultrasound. The nurse paints some molasses-colored liquid on Julie’s stomach, then places the end of a microphone-like gadget on top of that. She sticks the gadget in hard, indenting Julie’s stomach, and making me nervous. But there it is, there’s the baby.

  “Can you see an organ?” I ask.

  “Oh yes, you can see the heart,” she says, pointing to a little pulsating blip. “And that black spot is the liver.”

  “No, I mean the organ.” I want to know whether our kid will be a future reader of Esquire or of Cosmo.

  “Oh, I see,” says the nurse. “Let me get a better view of that.” She clicks a couple of buttons on the big humming ultrasound machine, switching to a new point of view. “Oh yes, there’s an organ there. You’ve got a boy.”

  The screen shows what appears to be a white blobby peninsula off the mainland. It’s not a bad-sized peninsula. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I could swear the nurse was impressed. She made a face that looked to me like “If I were single and thirty-five years younger …”

  But in any case, a boy. A boy who will not stutter. Julie and I aren’t sure how to react. The Jacobs name will continue, that’s one thing. But boys have a tendency to destroy more property than girls, and decorate the opposite wall with more lunches. But let’s not quibble here—we have a child. A beautiful child with a thumping heart and a black spot for a liver and an organ that could qualify him as the Milton Berle of fetuses.

  Julie gets dressed, and we go to pay the bill. While we’re waiting, I look out the window at the collection of softball fields. I guess I’m going to have to relearn how to swing a bat.

  “That’s a pretty park,” I say. “Which park is that?”

  “Uh, that’s a little park called Central Park.”

  “Oh.”

  “Where did you grow up, again?”

  Damn. She’s got a point. The Britannica hasn’t helped with my sense of direction.

  Suez Canal

  Just over a month till my Millionaire appearance, and I’m handling the pressure well. By which I mean I can’t sleep, can’t think straight, and eat only when I force food down my gullet. I’m not making nearly as much progress through the alphabet as I should. Instead, I’m spending my nights studying, reviewing, preparing. I feel as if I’m about to take the SATs again—but this time in front of millions of judgmental home viewers.

  Several times a day, I panic because I think of a topic that I have only a wobbly grasp on. In my pocket, I have an ever-growing list of these subjects—Plutarch, major bridges, pints versus quarts, Asian capitals, Russian nobles, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Francis Drake, robber barons, zodiac, Bayeux tapestry, Suez Canal (built in 1869, separates Asia and Africa). It’s like a syllabus from the College of Crazy.

  Since this project began, I’ve often felt that I’m been swimming in facts. But now I feel as if I’m immersed in them, drowning in the damn things. I had a weird sensation the other day. I was walking home from work up Central Park West, and I started to see the world as a collection of moving, pulsating, caroming facts. It was like that scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves’s character visualizes life as a stream of zeroes and ones. Same thing for me, but mine were facts about tires and lights and cement and awnings, all bouncing off one another. I’m losing it.

  I envy all those other, regular folks on Millionaire. They haven’t just spent the last year of their lives r
eading the encyclopedia. They haven’t declared to their friends and family and coworkers that they know almost everything there is to know. Their potential for humiliation? High. Mine? Stratospheric. (Note to self: study the levels of the atmosphere.)

  My confidence veers wildly. In my good moments, I just know I’ll be pocketing a seven-figure check. I fantasize about my victory speech. Maybe I’ll demand my winnings be given to me in one hundred $10,000 bills, the ones with Chief Justice Salmon Chase on the front. In my darker moments, I’m sure I’m going to muck it up on the hundred-dollar question. What if they ask about nursery rhymes? I don’t know my Little Jack Horner’s thumb from Little Miss Muffet’s tuffet. Or what if they ask about zebras or Zanzibar? I mean, the timing of my Millionaire appearance is good—I’m near the end of my alphabetic journey—but it’s not perfect. They could still trip me up with a yak fact.

  I’m annoyed at myself for placing so much emphasis on my performance. I know I’m relatively smart, I know I know a lot. Why do I need public proof of this? But I do. So I’ve been watching Millionaire every day, scrutinizing it—an activity that’s not good for my already shaky psyche. If Meredith asks the contestant a question that I know—and I do know most of them—it drives me batty. Why didn’t I get that one? My brain contains only a couple of million facts—and that’s another one I won’t get asked about. But if I don’t know the answer— that’s even worse. And there are those facts I just don’t know—facts that aren’t even in my beloved encyclopedia. The official name of the drumroll in taps? A muffled ruffle. That’s not in the Britannica. A new flavor of Life Saver? Blackberry. That ain’t in there.

  When I’m not hogging the TV watching my Millionaires, Julie watches this show on MTV about the life of a blond pop star named Jessica Simpson. Jessica’s become Public Imbecile Number One. Julie told me about how, on the very first episode, Jessica asked her husband whether tuna is a chicken or a fish. She can’t figure it out. Her surprised husband informs her that tuna is, in fact, a fish. Well, she responds, if it’s a fish and not a chicken, why does the container say “Chicken of the Sea”?

  At first, I chuckled. Yes, very funny. Jessica’s got a brain the size of a midget moth (wingspan three millimeters). But then I started to feel bad for Jessica. Or as bad as you can feel for a repulsively wealthy pop star. We all have those knowledge gaps, right? I once announced that I was never going to eat cheese again because it was made from cow pee. Okay, I was six years old when I said that. And I think it’s an honest mistake—confusing milk and urine. But still, those two months of mockery that ensued from my classmates, they leave a scar. More recently, I mixed up former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth and fat British actor Peter Ustinov, which led to a round of ridicule at work. Ueberroth and Ustinov—the walking encyclopedia has stumbled. Ha!

  What if I stumble on national TV? I could become the Jessica Simpson of my peer group. You can ingest facts for seventeen hours a day, every day of your life, and you’ll still have gaps. It’s just a matter of where the gaps are hidden and whether you can drive a truck through them, or a Segway scooter. That glorious cockiness I felt a couple of weeks back? The feeling that I could hold my own with Stephen Hawking? Gone. Vanished like the dodo bird (of which the only remnants are a head and foot at Oxford, a foot in the British Museum, a head in Copenhagen, and a handful of scattered bones).

  T

  Taiping Rebellion

  THIS WAS A Chinese upheaval in the mid–nineteenth century that “took an estimated 20,000,000 lives.”

  I read that sentence again. And again. It took 20 million lives. Holy shit. I try to process that enormous number. That’s four hundred stadiums full of human beings. That’s more than ten times the population of Manhattan. The Taiping Rebellion occurred about the same time as our own Civil War, which was horrible and bloody—and took less than seven hundred thousand lives. About 4 percent of the Taiping total. And I’ve barely even heard of this rebellion.

  I feel like an ignorant Westerner. Even with my liberal education, I learned next to nothing about the other side of the world, so that doesn’t feel good. But I also have another, stranger reaction. I feel angry at the Britannica. The Britannica just states that 20 million died in its typical deadpan tone. Shouldn’t there be three exclamation points after it? Shouldn’t it say, “took an infuckingsane 20 million lives”?

  There’s a disconnect. The Britannica is completely dispassionate, which I’ve always thought was one of its strengths. But how can you be dispassionate with crazy information like this? How can you try to deal with the horrors of human behavior as if you’re talking about tectonic plates? The Britannica’s tone lulls you into thinking that the world is rational, but entries like this one just stop you cold.

  The details of the story are sad and bizarre. The rebellion started with Hung Hsiu Chuan, a peasant from a small town in southern China. His early life was a disappointment—he took the Confucian civil service exam several times, but failed repeatedly. After the third failure, he suffered a breakdown, and experienced a vision in which he saw an old man with a golden beard, who told him the world was overrun with evil demons and presented him with a sword.

  After the fourth failure, Hung found a book that was written by a missionary, basically a Chinese-language Christianity for Dummies. He read the book and decided that the golden-bearded man in his vision was God, and he was the new Jesus Christ. Hung didn’t have the best grasp of Christianity—he ignored the kindness and humility of the Christian God and instead focused on his vengefulness— but that didn’t stop him from declaring himself Heavenly King.

  His message—a mix of primitive socialism, spiritualism, and Puritanism—struck a chord. He demanded an equal distribution of land; the abolition of gambling, prostitution, and opium smoking; and an end to the repressive Manchu rulers.

  He started out with hundreds, then thousands of followers. As the rebels passed through the countryside, says the Britannica, whole towns and villages joined them, till their ranks swelled to more than a million. Taiping followers were both men and women, but no sexual relations were permitted. Oh, except for the Taiping leaders, who had huge harems. That’s Cult Leader 101—always have a huge harem for yourself.

  Hung took Nanking and made the city his capital. He became increasingly erratic, and began killing off his lieutenants—one for demanding that Hung be whipped because he had kicked a concubine, another for just being generally haughty. In 1860, the Taiping troops failed to take Shanghai, which was defended by a Western-trained army. (One of the leaders of the anti-Taiping forces was a fearsome and ruthless man named General Tso, now reduced to a chicken entree.) Then in 1862 Nanking was surrounded. Hung—who had withdrawn to his harem—committed suicide, and Nanking fell in 1864.

  It’s an amazing tale. I imagine the million stories that have gone untold—what life was like if you were one of Hung’s lovers, how the world looked from inside besieged Nanking. But above all, I’m disillusioned with the Britannica. I’m not sure it’s equipped to deal with just how crazy people are.

  terrorism

  More horrible human behavior. Nearly two solid pages on the history of murdering innocent people.

  The entry is one of the most disturbing—and oddest—in the encyclopedia. It starts with terrorism in biblical times, then ticks off terrorism through the centuries, ending with four sentences on September 11. It was a disorienting feeling, to read just a few sentences on September 11.

  I happen to know from the Britannica publicist that the encyclopedia was at the printer when the World Trade Center towers fell. They had to pull the books off the presses and insert a couple of paragraphs. I’m sure next year’s edition will have much more on the attack.

  So maybe it’s not fair to draw any conclusions based on this edition. Still, seeing the September 11 attack in historical context had a calming effect. It gave me hope that, as my parents’ friend said, this too shall pass. I don’t mean to trivialize September 11, which was probably the most
awful thing I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. But seeing it among the thousands of other horrible—and great—events gives me hope that we can overcome it.

  My reaction was, ironically, the exact opposite of the one I had to the Taiping Rebellion. The dispassionate tone I found so outrageous a few entries ago, I now found soothing. Such is the mental whiplash of reading the Britannica.

  Tesla, Nikola

  Our pregnancy books say that I should talk to my gestating boy so he’ll get used to my voice. Tonight, I decide to read to him about electronics pioneer Nikola Tesla, the main rival of Thomas Edison and the inventor of alternating current. Embryos love electronics pioneers.

  I lean toward Julie’s stomach—which has just recently started to swell, and now resembles the gut of a man who drinks too many Budweisers on the weekends. I begin to read:

  “He was quite impractical in financial matters and an eccentric.” I’m using my best singsongy, reading-to-kids voice. I hope he likes it. “He was driven by compulsions and a progressive germ phobia.”

  “Just like Dad!” says Julie.

  “Yes, just like Dad.” I continue with the Tesla bio: “Caustic criticism greeted his speculations concerning communication with other planets, his assertions that he could split the Earth like an apple, and his claim of having invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles.”

  I look up at Julie. “Is he kicking?”

  She shakes her head. No movement.

  “He’s probably rapt with attention.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably it.”

  I realize I can’t wait for this boy to come out. I can’t wait for him to fall in love with learning and knowledge like the rest of the Jacobs men. The poor guy.

  theater

  In the 19th century, theaters featured a genre called “the racing drama,” where live horses galloped on treadmills set into the stage floor. The chariot race from Ben Hur was staged this way in 1899. Too bad this was discontinued. Even I’d go to the theater to see that.