Episode description

When A.J. Jacobs decided to immerse himself in early Americana, he didn’t think about the fact that the required wool stockings wouldn’t have elastic.

“They would fall down to my ankles,” he laughs. “I had to put on little sock belts every morning. I’ll never get back that time.”

But no matter. He was committed to getting into the headspace of the Founding Fathers, because he wanted to better understand the reasoning and the intentionality of America’s foundational document

The result is his new book, “The Year of Living Constitutionally.” It’s part performative art — “I went method,” he says — and part intellectual adventure. While writing with a quill pen, lighting his house with beeswax candles and wearing a tricorn, Jacobs researched and talked to dozens of scholars about how to best interpret the Constitution.

“We see it as etched in stone,” he tells host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “But it was really deeply fluid. If we recapture that mindset, maybe we will be more flexible in our thinking today.”

Guest:

• A.J. Jacobs is a journalist and an author. His past books include “The Year of Living Biblically” and “Drop Dead Healthy.” His newest is “The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning.”

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