Dibs

Idi Amin’s shag rug, Saddam Hussein’s murals, what appears to be colonic-irrigation equipment in Nicolae Ceausescu palace (whose construction required the demolition of 7,000 structures) … laugh and cry as you pore through vintage photographs detailing the home decor of infamous men and women whom style-guru York calls “the world’s most colorful despots,” but who [...]

Toronto.

An English manor house in the 1920s. Part love story, part mystery — a young poet commits suicide right before a plush society party. The only witnesses are a pair of sisters: one is engaged to the poet; the other may or may not be his lover. They become estranged. At 29, debut novelist Kate [...]

He’s got a hunch that Oprah Winfrey doesn’t like black men, and he’s talking about it on radio shows nationwide. Syracuse University finance professor Boyce Dewhite Watkins, author of What If George Bush Were a Black Man?, fuels his claim by pointing to the recent feud between Winfrey and Ice Cube — who, along with [...]

He wasn’t hanging out at the prison library to bone up on botany or read the entire ouevre of Rumer Godden. Instead, Rudolfo García-Lopez was scouring the shelves for books containing maps of Texas, photocopying them to aid in his escape plan. After cutting through a prison fence and climbing serpentine wire to break out [...]

Have you ever wondered what Peter Pan’s been up to since … well, since Peter Pan? Revealing yet again its increasing tendency not to leave good enough alone, Disney has launched a series of sequels. This one follows Peter and the Starcatchers, and we find the flying boy sallying forth into pirate territory, where he [...]

A Muslim organization in Indonesia is striving to set a world record by creating the largest-ever replica of the Koran. Made of massive batik sheets and measuring about seven feet by three feet (2.250m by 1.15m), the faux holy book took ten years to complete and will be publicly unveiled for the first time, according [...]

An Illinois school-board member has just lost her bid to have nine popular books banned from the required-reading list in the state’s second-largest district. Lesley Pinney, the mother of a local high-school grad, sought to ban Beloved by Toni Morrison, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, The Awakening by Kate [...]

In 2004, Neal David Sutz of Scottsdale, Arizona sued Dr. Phil McGraw and Paramount after refusing to sign a document allegedly required of all the TV show’s audience members specifying that they are not mentally ill or under psychiatric care. Sutz talked about his suit on Howard Stern’s show, and plugged his documentary film-in-progress about [...]

Tempers are flaring in Australia, where a wildly controversial author has just been appointed to the board of the national broadcasting corporation. Keith Windschuttle is a University of New South Wales professor and historian whose 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History boldly claimed that his fellow historians conspired to fib in misrepresenting their nation’s [...]