Even if books are absent from fifty percent of American homes, kids still read books in school … right? Wrong, now that California is instituting a new bookless mode of teaching history and social studies, “in what could be the first large-scale step to eliminate books from classrooms,” according to a terrifying story in Reuters: [...]
Americans neither know nor care much about the game of cricket, but maybe we should, coz apparently it turns you into a sex magnet, as revealed in a new book about Australian player Shane Keith Warne, who “had sex with at least 1000 women and was caught just five times,” according to Cricketzone.com. Caught? Is [...]
It’s now being called “the Battle of Brick Lane” — the mostly Bangladeshi residents of London’s Brick Lane district have used what some would call protests and others, including Dibs!, would call threats to keep a film version of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane from being shot in their neighborhood. The Guardian reports that veteran [...]
The Marvel Comics character Blade the Vampire Slayer was a role model inspiring a young Brooklyn man to kill the violent drunkard who had, moments before, shot the youth’s mother to death. As reported in the Downtown Star, Emmanuel Allen returned last week to the Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment that he had once shared with his girlfriend [...]
Young British historian Richard Hargreaves has spent £40,000 (around $80,000 US) and fifteen years researching and writing a book about the momentous WWII landings and battles at Normandy … from the Nazis’ point of view. Planned for a September release, The Germans in Normandy sprang from an idea that Hargreaves had as a 19-year-old media [...]
According to the Lowell Sun in Jack Kerouac’s Massachusetts hometown, the executor of Kerouac’s literary estate says he signed a contract on Sunday with Viking/Penguin to publish an unedited version of On the Road next year — exactly as it appeared in its original “scroll” version, typed over three weeks on one continuous 120-foot roll [...]
Stylemaking singer, tragic addict — Billie Holiday is a cultural icon right up there with I Dream of Jeannie and Che Guevara. But now evidence is emerging that Holiday was a big fibber. Lies pepper her ghostwritten 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues — and they pepper the new 50th-anniversary edition from Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, [...]
Over the next few weeks, Mini Cooper — the company that makes those cute retro cars — will run an ad campaign aimed at Americans who already own the cars. It seems an odd choice of target market, but the campaign sounds so cute. Encrypted ads will appear in major magazines such as the New [...]
A White Castle burger. Those inexpensive little burgers dispensed 24 hours a day in hundreds of slightly castellar-looking structures throughout eleven American states — it’s White Castle, a cliché and a staple all rolled into one, for the millions who live in their midst (not including Dibs!, who has never actually seen one). Now, to [...]
A Japanese theatrical troupe is performing the Celtic chivalry epic Tristan and Isolde — Cornish knight, Irish princess, love potion, danger, escape, mortal wounds, misery — set not in the misty, chilly region of its origins but in Okinawa, Honshu and Hokkaido — with Tristan as a tribal Ainu. According to the Japan Times, “Satoshi [...]