Joel Stein is desperate for attention. He grew up in Edison, N.J., went to Stanford and then worked for Martha Stewart for a year. After a year of fact-checking at various important publications (okay, Readers Digest Books and TV Guide), he got hired as a sports editor at Time Out New York, where they paid him to write sentences. He felt like the luckiest boy in the world.

But the luck was just beginning.

Two years later he lucked into a job as a staff writer for Time magazine, where over seven and a half years he wrote a dozen cover stories on subjects such as Michael Jordan, Las Vegas, the Internet bubble and — it being Time and he being a warm body in the office — low-carb diets.

Being desperate for attention, he has appeared on any TV show that asks him: VH1's "I Love the Decade You Tell Me I Love," HBO's "Phoning It In," Comedy Central's "Reel Comedy" and E! Entertainment's "101 Hottest Hot Hotties' Hotness." This, to his surprise, is the only thing anyone knows him for. But he’ll take it any way he can.

After teaching a class in humor writing at Princeton, he moved to L.A. at the beginning of 2005 to write a column for the Los Angeles Times and work as a sitcom writer. In addition to working for the failed show Crumbs, he has already had two failed pilots at ABC and hopes to expand into failed pilots at other networks.

He still contributes to Time and whatever magazines allow him to. Did he mention that he taught at Princeton? The University?

And, yes, he’s married. To a woman. Shut up.

For an unbiased view, you can go to wikipedia. Warning: It isn’t all nice. But it’s accurate, except the part about my first boss, Martha Stewart, firing me twice in one day. She doesn’t have time for two firings. The woman has jellies to jar.