It's a big birthday for Bruce Springsteen. The rock legend turns 60 today. Also celebrating: Jermaine Dupri is turning 37. Singer Julio Iglesias turns 66. Mickey Rooney is 89. Playwright George C. Wolfe is turning 55. Jason Alexander of Seinfeld fame is 50. Hedge fund manager Marc Lasry is turning 50, too. Ani DiFranco turns 39. Writer Joshua Foer is turning 27. Writer/blogger Ana Marie Cox is 37. And Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain turns 24 today.
Far be it from us to make you dread the year before it's properly begun, but if you assumed that the blood pressure-raising murderousness you once felt toward Brooklyn boy-wonder novelist Jonathan Safran Foer was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, during 2009 his brother Joshua Foer will sadly prove you wrong. Foer the younger is about to launch a travel website (featuring "all the curious, wondrous and bizarre places that are just below the radar of more conventional travel guides") and this fall will see the launch of Moonwalking with Einstein, his book on memory that, since it cost Penguin $1.2 million to acquire, will probably be promoted until we beg for mercy. [New Statesman]
Bruce Springsteen has been collecting praise for nearly four decades now; in a few short years, he'll be collecting social security, too: Bruce turns 59 today. Others celebrating: Hedge fund manager (and Chelsea Clinton's boss) Marc Lasry is 49. Jermaine Dupri is turning 36. Playwright and director George C. Wolfe is 54. Seinfeld (and pretzel commercial) star Jason Alexander is 49. Writer Joshua Foer (and brother of JSF) is turning 26. Ani DiFranco is 38. Actor Mickey Rooney turns 88. And singer Julio Iglesias celebrates his 65th birthday today.
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.
So yeah, Slate scribe and Jonathan Safran Foer sib Joshua sold his memoir about memorizing shit to Anne Godoff for a cool 1.2 million, like we said.
Today we learn that film rights to the book, now tentatively titled Moonwalking with Einstein, have sold to Paramount.
The book sold on the basis of a proposal, which we hear was rather scanty and unimpressive. But maybe Joshua's a really kickass writer whose work is worth a ton of money. Let's dip into our own archives and see if we can come up with any evidence either way . . . ah, here we go. Joshua Foer, on Conor Oberst:
