A. J. Jacobs

Roughly seven hundred rules sit in the Bible, and A. J. Jacobs set out to keep every one of them for a year. The Year of Living Biblically (2007) records the attempt: the beard he let grow because Leviticus forbids trimming it, the white clothes, the ban on mixed fibres, and a long run of visits to Amish farmers in Pennsylvania, Hassidic Jews in Brooklyn, Jehovah's Witnesses, snake handlers and a Samaritan community in Israel. Jacobs was born in New York in 1968 into a secular Jewish family, studied at Brown, and spent years as an editor at Esquire, where immersion became his method. He had already read all thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for The Know-It-All (2004), and later chased perfect health in Drop Dead Healthy (2012) and lived by the founding documents for The Year of Living Constitutionally (2024). CBS turned the biblical year into a sitcom, Living Biblically, which lasted one season in 2018.