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Article Two: The Know- It-All One Man 32 Volumes
A.J. Jacobs
A.J. Jacobs

Even with an Ivy League education and a list of enviable professional accomplishments, A.J. Jacobs, a senior editor at Esquire magazine, felt he wasn't as smart as he should be. Jacobs devised a plan to become the smartest person in the world by learning without going back to school. His plan? To read the Encyclopædia Britannica from cover to cover, all 32 volumes, 33,000 pages, 44 million words, and 65,000 articles.

While Jacobs doubts he's the smartest living human, he did earn bragging rights. Just published by Simon & Schuster, 'The Know-It-All: One Man's
Humble Attempt to Become the Smartest Person in the World',describes Jacobs' knowledge-enabled adventures (he tries to join Mensa and goes on ' Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?') while dropping tantalizing summaries of the encyclopedia's more obscure contents. Inside Britannica commends Jacobs for his choice of reading material and brings you some highlights of the book.
  • During World War II, the British ate the fish from the London Zoo.
  • Latin can save your life if you're an accused murderer in 15th century England, like playwright Ben Jonson (right). After killing a man in a duel, Jonson escaped capital punishment by pleading "benefit of clergy," a British law that said if you could read Latin, you couldn't be executed.
 Ben Jonson
  • Oysters (right) can change their sex from male to female and back again. Rhythmic hermaphrodism allows them to switch gender with changes in the water temperature.
 European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis)
  • In addition to his mathematical Theorem, Pythagoras founded a religion that instructed adherents to wear white clothes, observe sexual purity, and refrain from touching beans.
  • Lichen, an unsung hero of the American Revolution: George Washington's starving troops ate lichen off the rocks at Valley Forge.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne (right), toward the end of his life, obsessively wrote the number "64" on little scraps of paper.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, photograph by Mathew Brady.
  • Renaissance painter Caravaggio killed a man while arguing over the score of a tennis match.
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