Joel Stein grew up in Edison, NJ, went to Stanford, and in 1997, became a staff writer for TIME. In 1998, he began writing his sophomoric humor column that now appears in the magazine every week. He’s also written fourteen cover stories for TIME, and has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, Details, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Businessweek, Wired, Real Simple, Sunset, Playboy, Elle, Los Angeles Times, and many more magazines, most of which have gone out of business. He has appeared as a talking head on any TV show that asks him, taught a class in humor writing at Princeton, and wrote a weekly column for the back page of Entertainment Weekly and the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. This is the most he’s ever written in third person.