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 have appeared in Slate and The Nation, and in 2011 he published his first book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

With his two older brothers Franklin (former 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, to Penguin Press. 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. The book was finally published in 2011, and Columbia Pictures snatched up the film rights shortly thereafter. [Image via Getty]