The smudge looked suspiciously penis- like. The doctor confirmed: That's the baby's penis! which caused not celebration, but panic. Joel pictured having to go camping and fix a car and use a hammer and throw a football and watch professionals throw footballs and figure out whether to be sad or happy about the results of said football throwing.
So begins his quest to confront his effete nature whether he likes it or not (he doesn't), by doing a twenty-four-hour shift with L.A. firefighters, going hunting, rebuilding a house, driving a Lamborghini, enduring three days of boot camp with the U.S. Army, day-trading with $100,000, and going into the ring with UFC Hall of Famer Randy Couture. Seeking help from a panel of experts, including his manly father-in-law, Boy Scouts, former NFL star Warren Sapp, former MLB All-Star Shawn Green, Adam Carolla, and a pit bull named Hercules, 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.
Joel Steingrew up in Edison, N.J., and went to Stanford. From 1997-2017 he was a staff writer for
Timemagazine, writing a regular humor column and more than a dozen cover stories; he was also the back page columnist for
Entertainment Weeklyand the opinion section of the
Los Angeles Times. He has contributed to
Bloomberg Businessweek, GQ, Esquire,the
New Yorker, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, the
New York Times Book Review, Elle,and
Men's Health.
Stein was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton and has appeared as a talking head on television shows such as
Real Time with Bill Maher, Late Night with Conan O'Brien,and VH1's
I Love The '80s. He's interviewed celebrities for HBO, Cinemax, and Comedy Central. In addition to writing on staff for two television shows, he created an animated show for VH1 (
Hey Joel) and wrote six netwolC,