Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 156. Not illustrated. Chapters: David Rakoff, Dan Savage, David Sedaris, John Hodgman, Sarah Vowell, Ira Glass, Jon Ronson, Julia Sweeney, Jonathan Goldstein, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jake Warga, Davy Rothbart, Mike Birbiglia, Karen Sosnoski, Sandra Tsing Loh, Jon Langford, Shalom Auslander, Jack Hitt, Scott Carrier, Alex Blumberg, Dishwasher Pete, Jay Allison, Heather O'neill, Nancy Updike, Starlee Kine, Annie Baxter, Adam Davidson. Excerpt: David Rakoff (born November 27, 1964) is a Canadian-born writer based in New York City who is noted for his humorous, sometimes autobiographical non-fiction essays. Rakoff is an essayist, journalist and actor and is a regular contributor to Public Radio International's This American Life. Perhaps mocking the unimaginative pigeonholing of his work, Rakoff has described himself as "a 'New York writer' who also happens to be a 'Canadian writer', a 'Jewish writer', a 'gay writer' and an 'East Asian Studies major who has forgotten most of his Japanese writer'." David Rakoff was born (significantly, by caesarean section) on November 27, 1964 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is the youngest of three children: his brother, the comedian Simon Rakoff, is four years older than David and their sister Ruth was a chef and is now a family-conflict mediator, is the middle child. David Rakoff has said that he and his siblings were close as children. Rakoff's mother, Gina Shochat-Rakoff, is a doctor who has practised psychotherapy and his father, Vivian Rakoff, is a psychiatrist. Psychiatry and psychology are common themes in David Rakoff's work, both in his journalism and in his autobiographical essays about his lengthy experience as an analysand and his long-time role as a confidante. Also, his knowledge of psychiatry played an obvious role in his work as the impersonator of the father of psychiatry. Rakoff has wr...