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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

.” 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.”

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When A.J. Jacobs embarked on his “Year of Living Constitutionally,” he pulled out the beeswax candles and the tricorn hat and discovered some profound truths about our complicated and flawed founding document. 

Author A.J. Jacobs attempts a year of living constitutionally

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Author A.J. Jacobs attempts a year of living constitutionally

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