Jacob was born in Rochester, New York, but he lived for most of his childhood in suburban Atlanta, Georgia. Until high school, he assumed that he would work with computers—his father was a computer science professor, after all—but in his teens, he discovered a love for the written word. While he attended Georgia Tech, he majored in the closest thing that school had to an English program, receiving a fascinating, multidisciplinary liberal arts education with a strong scientific focus. Since graduation, he has worked for an environmental nonprofit, spent several years as a jack-of-all-subjects tutor, and spearheaded the creation of curriculum materials for a national tutoring company. He has also written for several prominent baseball blogs. In his free time, he enjoys running, yoga, reading, puzzles of all types, and the strategy card game Magic: the Gathering. He has two cats who have only one thing in common: their orange fur.
Favorite Periodicals:
Papirmass (a monthly art subscription service)
FiveThirtyEight.com
The A.V. Club
Mental Floss
Favorite Books:
White Noise — Don DeLillo
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
The Devil in the White City — Erik Larsen
Swamplandia! — Karen Russell
A Song of Ice and Fire — George R.R. Martin
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — Michael Chabon
