Being the Ultimate Constitutional Originalist in 2024 Means Donning a Tricorn Hat and Applying to Practice Piracy

Being the Ultimate Constitutional Originalist in 2024 Means Donning a Tricorn Hat and Applying to Practice Piracy

Many decisions impacting the lives of Americans today adhere to a set of rules established over 200 years ago. The Constitution is in the news more than ever as politicians and Supreme Court justices battle over how literally it should be taken. Did the framers intend for Americans to follow their instructions as written for eternity? Or did they want to offer a set of guidelines that would evolve as time marched on? These are the questions today’s guest, A.J. Jacobs, author of the Year of Living Constitutionally, set out to answer.

For one year, he committed to living as the original originalist, expressing his constitutional rights using the tools, lifestyle and mindset of when they were written in 1787. He bore muskets. He wrote pamphlets with a goose quill by candlelight. He quartered soldiers. He tried to pay for goods and services with gold. He applied for a letter of marque from Congress, which would make him a legal pirate (a practice that the U.S. government sanctioned during the Revolutionary War). He gave his friends the same gift that George Washington did: a lock of his own hair. This year-long project was Jacobs’ humble attempt to figure out how to interpret the Constitution and whether we can improve the American experiment.

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Jaksot(1077)

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How Two California Wines Shattered Centuries of French Supremacy in a Blind Taste Test

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In 1976, nine French wine judges did the unthinkable: they blindly selected two California wines over France's most elite vintages in what became known as the Judgment of Paris. This shocking upset se...

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How an Italian Engineer with 700 Knights Defeated 100,000 Ottoman Troops at the Siege Rhodes

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Throughout the 16th century, one man stood between the Ottoman Empire and European domination, yet his name has been largely forgotten. Gabriele Tadino was an Italian military engineer whose genius tr...

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Why America's Military Never Became a Threat to Democracy

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Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists famously described the First Amendment as building a "wall of separation between church and State." This line has been the gold standard for thos...

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Every Communication Breakthrough—From Cave Art to AI Video—Exists to Tell Stories

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There’s an argument to be made that every technology advance in communication – from cave paintings to fake AI movie trailers – is at its root an attempt to tell stories. Our first night-fires created...

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The East’s Auschwitz: How Imperial Japan’s Secret Experimenters Escaped Justice

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