Since 1998, Joel Stein has written a regular humor column in TIME magazine, where it clearly does not belong. Especially when you consider that he has written about his wife eating her own placenta, writing a memoir in one day to show up Sarah Palin, his mom’s second wedding and getting a medical marijuana card while being perfectly healthy. In the name of participatory journalism, he often risks his body and his pride – and he usually loses.

Since joining TIME in 1997, he has written 13 cover stories, including one in which George Clooney came to his house for dinner. He covers food (Tom Collichio cooked a meal for under $10 at his house) and celebrities (he and Paul Rudd went to a bar to find another guy for a straight man date) for TIME, but also writes about politics (covering Joe Biden during the 2008 campaign), business (two covers on Las Vegas), sports (a cover on Michael Jordan) and technology (two covers on the internet boom).

In 2002, he also wrote the back page column for Entertainment Weekly; from 2004-2009 he wrote a weekly opinion column for the Los Angeles Times; he currently writes a monthly column for Men’s Health. He has also contributed to the New Yorker, Businessweek, Fortune, Wired, Esquire, GQ, Details, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Sunset, Elle, Playboy, Women’s Health and a whole lot of magazine that have folded in the last few years, none of which was his fault.

Stein has appeared on any TV show that asks him, hosting an intersiticial interview show for Cinemax and HBO since 1998. He’s also appeared on VH-1’s I Love the ‘80’s (or any other decade they tell him to love), too many shows on E! Entertainment that have titles such as 101 Hottest Hot Hotties, as well as Real Time with Bill Maher, Nightline, the Today Show, Good Morning America and the ABC Nightly News.

Although he was a writer for one season of an ABC sitcom (Crumbs), he has spent far more time writing failed pilots for network television (five of them, two of which were shot, none of which the public was asked to endure). He has spent a week as a fellow at the Hoover Institute on the Stanford campus, where he got his B.A. and M.A. in English. He also taught humor writing at Princeton, where they probably should be doing more important things.

Stein’s first book is Man Up, in which, at 39 years old, he finally learns to be a man. In the book, he goes a round with the UFC’s Randy Couture, fires an Abrams tank at Ft. Hood, does boot camp with the Marines, spends a day as a firefighter, builds a house, works in a race car pit crew, goes turkey hunting and earns his first Boy Scout badge during a camping trip. He expects to learn that masculinity is defined not by the size of his muscles, but by the size of his heart (also, technically, a muscle). This is not at all what he learns.