In 2003, A. J. Jacobs published a book entitled The Know-It-All. That book was based on his experience of reading through the Encyclopaedia Britannica in one year. He read all forty-four million words on thirty-three thousand pages. Mr. Jacobs, a journalist by trade, now knows all sorts of minutiae. He knows that the British tried to tax clocks in 1797, that absentee voting is very popular in Ireland, and that there is a heated controversy over who invented the accordion. Mr. Jacobs personifies