About Us

Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George

That's us, over on the right. Lawrence is on top. We're in the rolling stacks of Amherst College's Frost Library. (We hotwired the circuits so that the shelving would close in on us.)

LD was born and raised in Great Neck, New York. In high school at G.N. South, he co-captained the Long Island champion debate team and had bad insomnia. Rejected by Princeton, which he didn't want to attend anyway, he went to Brown. After college, he spent three years in Europe, playing lots of mini-golf and teaching American politics to NATO soldiers. He started a Ph.D. program in political theory but bailed after a year. Having no idea what to do with his life, he took the LSAT, did better than expected, and went to Yale Law School. At Yale, he drafted testimony opposing Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court and was co-founder and first Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Mainly though, he sat in Sterling Library writing stories. Wracked with panic after receiving an offer from a famous Manhattan law firm, LD realized that legal practice was out of the question. Luckily for him, he got a job teaching in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought at Amherst. At Amherst, he teaches many students and regularly goes to the gym. When not writing humor, he writes on war crimes and perpetrator trials, and is an expert on Nuremberg and Eichmann. He is married and has two boys, both of whom are Lego™ fanatics and draw extremely well. You can send him your questions about humor or the pending trial of Saddam Hussein at lrdouglas at amherst dot edu.

Rumors of AG’s non-existence (promulgated, he suspects, by LD) have been greatly exaggerated.  AG hit the scene at the Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital (R.I.P.) in Manhattan and has spent his entire life in the confines of elite locales and institutions. They have formed, refined, and mangled his sensibilities beyond repair, and he loves and loathes them as only an intimate can. He was drawn to philosophy, the world's second-oldest profession, from an early age, and now teaches the subject at Amherst College. When he’s not busy edifying his students, thinking about logic and language, or producing “humor” to pay for his expensive addictions, he is either playing chess or trying to make decisions, two activities for which he has little talent. He can be sent blandishments, reminders of his debts, or recipes for Rigo Jancsi at ageorge at amherst dot edu.

LD and AG have collaborated since 1995. Their work has tickled the fancy of millions through the pages of The New Yorker; New York Times Book Review; Boston Globe Magazine; Chronicle of Higher Education; Tikkun; McSweeney's—we could go on, but modesty counsels otherwise. If you want to see them live (well, not live, but virtually live, sort of like they are when they're teaching, except fuzzier than in the classroom, unless you weren't wearing your glasses in class or were hung over), you'll find them over here.

Credits and thanks to:

Willa Jarnagin for website design
Jill Cirasella for html troubleshooting
Frank Ward for authors' photograph
David Ter-Avanesyan for transgendered Shakespeare

All written material on this website is © 2004-7 by Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George. Please note that LD has a law degree from Yale and, while he hasn't a clue about legal practice, he will write nasty letters to anyone who pays for college by selling our material on street corners.