Who

Joshua may be the youngest of the three Foer boys, but he's wasted no time proving himself as irksome and precocious as older brother Jonathan. Joshua's science-related freelance articles appear in Slate and The Nation.

Backstory

With his two older brothers Franklin (editor of the New Republic) and Jonathan Safran (author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), Joshua grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Washington, D.C., and went to an Ivy League school (in his case, Yale). He got an internship at Slate—Franklin was an editor there at the time—and began writing articles on topics like ADHD medications and what it's like to be struck by lightning. He also went undercover as a fundamentalist Christian on a visit to Bob Jones University. In 2007 his agent, Elyse Cheney, sold a memoir, Moonwalking with Einstein: A Journey into Memory and the Mind, to Penguin Press for $1.2 million. (Paramount later snatched up the film rights and attracted screenwriter/director Mike White to the project.) The book began with a 2005 Slate article about memory, which Foer was researching when he entered the U.S.A. National Memory Championship and won first prize.

Off hours

Foer is the founding member and secretary of the Athanasius Kircher Society, which is named after the 17th Century oddball thinker.

Personal

Foer is single. Although he currently lives in a regular old apartment, he told Cabinet magazine that he is trying to grow a house out of trees in a process called "arborsculpture." (In the past, he has grown benches, chairs, a spiral staircase, and a gazebo.) He says his prospective house is already four feet tall.