Susan Jacoby (; born June 4, 1945) is an American author. Her 2008 book about American anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason, was a New York Times best seller. She is an atheist and a secularist. Jacoby graduated from Michigan State University in 1965. She lives in New York City. Life and career Jacoby, who began her career as a reporter for The Washington Post, has been a contributor to a variety of national publications, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, The Nation, Glamour, and the AARP Bulletin and AARP Magazine. She is currently a panelist for "On Faith," a Washington Post-Newsweek blog on religion. As a young reporter she lived for two years in the USSR. Raised in a Catholic home (her mother was from an Irish Catholic family), Jacoby was 24 before she learned that her father, Robert, had been born into a Jewish family. Jacoby explored these roots in her 2000 book Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past. (Robert Jacoby's brother was the great bridge player Oswald Jacoby.) Her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was named a notable book of 2004 by The Washington Post and The New York Times. It was also named an Outstanding International Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement (London) and The Guardian. Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (1984) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Jacoby also won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1974 to research and write about the new Americans: immigration into the U.S. In The Age of American Unreason (2008) Jacoby contends that the dumbing down of America, which she describes as "a virulent mixture of anti-rationalism and low expectations", is more a permanent state than a temporary one whose basis is the top down influence of false populist politicians striving to be seen as approachable instead of intelligent. She writes that the increasing use of colloquial and casual language in official speech, such as referring to everyone as "folks", is "symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards" and "conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls." In February 2010 she was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary