Life as an experiment

Imagine taking a cue from Thomas Friedman's book, "The World is Flat," and making arrangements for the ultimate in outsourcing. You hire a personal assistant in India to handle key aspects of your life, including writing emails to your wife.

Imagine if you told people what you really thought. No censoring yourself. No holding back. Just complete honesty, every single time, no matter the consequences.

Wrap your mind around those two concepts and you get the drift of A.J. Jacobs' new book, "The Guinea Pig Diaries." It's a quick and fun read -- the perfect book for summer reading, except you can enjoy it now in the middle of winter -- by one of the editors at Esquire. Each of the nine chapters is based on a piece previously published in the magazine, except that in this compilation Jacobs adds a postscript to each chapter and includes extensive notes that elaborate on many of his observations and theories.

Like the late George Plimpton, who achieved a certain degree of fame by immersing himself in professional sports and writing about it from an amateur's experience -- including getting tackled by a pro football player, getting punched in the face by a boxer -- Jacobs enthusiastically dives into a number of real-life situations, although in his case none involves the risk of physical harm.

He goes to the Academy Awards disguised as a movie star to understand what it's like to be famous, just for a night. He attempts to follow George Washington's 110 rules of "civility and decent behaviour" and spends a lot of time bowing and doffing his tri-cornered hat. He poses as a beautiful woman online (using his nanny's photo, with her permission) and discovers the power of a hot woman in responding to hundreds of men who e-mail her.

But the funniest chapters are the two I mentioned at the start. As the author explains:

To understand the global phenomenon that is outsourcing, I outsourced everything in my life. I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to answer my phone, answer my e-mail, argue with my spouse for me. This, by the way, was probably the best month of my life.

To explore the meaning of Truth, I decided to practice something called Radical Honesty. I spent a month without lying. But more than that, I vowed to say whatever popped into my head. No filter between the brain and the mouth. This, by the way, was probably the worst month of my life.

For his first two books, Jacobs read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica ("The Know-It-All") and then attempted to live by the rules of the Bible, following the Ten Commandments as literally as possible ("The Year of Living Biblically").

Is all this just a clever schtick? Of course. But Jacobs has become a modern master of the genre. You could say he's self-absorbed and you'd be right. But he writes with a light touch and his serving as a guinea pig for stunts like Radical Honesty or the ultimate outsourcing means we can laugh along with him even as we contemplate the serious aspects of his experiments.