BIOGRAPHY

Jacobs is the editor at large at Esquire magazine and author of four New York Times bestsellers.

In 2004, Simon & Schuster published The Know-It-All. It subsequently spent eight weeks on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. It was praised by Time magazine, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, USA Today, Janet Maslin in the New York Times and AJ’s uncle Henry on Amazon.com.

In 2007, The Year of Living Biblically was released. It spent three months on the NYT bestseller list, and was praised by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and others. It appeared on the cover of the evangelical magazine Relevant, but was also featured in Penthouse. (Jacobs is proud to be a uniter, not a divider).

In 2010 came My Life as an Experiment: One Man's Humble Quest to Improve Himself. The book contains some previously published experiments (including “My Outsourced Life,” Jacobs’ quest to delegate every task in his life to India, from answering emails to arguing with his wife). It also has new experiments -- including life-changing quests featuring George Washington’s rules of life, marital harmony, marital disharmony, multitasking and nudity - not in that order. (The book came out in Hardcover in 2009 under the title The Guinea Pig Diaries)

In 2012, Jacobs published Drop Dead Healthy. It is the tale of his quest to be as healthy as humanly possible for which he revamped his diet, excercise regimen, sleep schedule, sex life, posture and more. He wrote the book on a treadmill desk (It took him about 1,200 miles).

In addition to his books, Jacobs written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, New Yorkmagazine and Dental Economics magazine, one of the top five magazines about the financial side of toothcare.

He has appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Dr. Oz Show, The Colbert Report and Late Night with Conan O’Brien (though Conan did decline Jacobs’ offer to bring the remnants of his shaved beard in a plastic bag).

He has given several TED talks, including one about living biblically and one about health.

He is a periodic commentator on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, where he discusses important facts, such as the fact that opossums have 13 nipples.

Jacobs grew up in New York City. His father is a lawyer who holds the world record for the most footnotes in a law review article (4,824). His wife works for a highbrow scavenger hunt called Watson Adventures. He lives in New York with his family. He wonders if he fooled anyone with this third-person thing, or if everyone knows that he wrote this bio himself.