Even celebrity tell-alls have their sell-by dates. Princess Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, is now trying to publicize his second memoir about life with the late royal. But at his latest signing, at a bookstore in the English town of Wrexham, Burrell attracted an audience of — count ‘em — five. “You may have been [...]
In 1995, Twyana Davis gave birth in her Ohio college dorm room, wrapped the baby in plastic bags and stuffed it into a trash bin, presumably hoping that the tiny girl would die. After a passerby rescued the infant and detectives discovered whose it was, Davis told the media that she’d become pregnant while being [...]
It’s yard-sale and flea-market day, Saturday — so what better time to post about how one of the greatest, rarest and most valuable photography books ever published recently turned up in a Canadian dump and then at a local flea market? “In 1934, the great surrealist photographer Man Ray published a book, Photographies 1920-1934, in [...]
In response to one of the very earliest Dibs! posts — a review of Dan Rockmore’s Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis — Dibs! has recently received an astonishing email from Jiang Chun-Xuan, a mathematician in China who claims to have disproved the legendarily difficult problem. Jiang included in his email a detailed mathematical paper (which you [...]
A Chasidic rabbi in New York invoked comic-book superheroes during his Yom Kippur sermon this year. These figures who leap tall buildings in single bounds inspired him as a youth in Britain and, as his new book reveals, they have Jewish roots. Self-described “comic-book rabbi” Simcha Weinstein, the official rabbi of Pratt Institute and the [...]
These days, as the lines grow ever fuzzier between truth and fiction, conspiracy and history, it no longer seems to matter whether certain figures actually ever lived. We’ve made movies about them, put them into novels, and it was all such a long time ago that who cares whether they actually rode horses, burped and [...]
Hark back to those balmy days of 1980, when Adam and the Ants was an art-school-new-wave band helmed by Adam Ant, real name Stuart Goddard, who drew on his father’s Romany (“gypsy”) heritage when designing his own flamboyant dark-haired stage persona. He had a relationship with Jamie Lee Curtis, and the band broke up in [...]
After Fantasia Barrino won the 2005 American Idol competition, it was revealed that the dazzling singer was functionally illiterate. Shortly afterward, she became the “author” of an autobiography. And now Barrino’s dad is suing Simon & Schuster, which published Fantasia: Life Is Not A Fairy Tale. According to AP: “Joseph Barrino disputes details in the [...]
Award-winning Japanese novelist Bando Masako threw kittens over a cliff. As a result, she might now face prosecution for breaking animal-protection laws in Tahiti, where she lives. In a column she wrote for the Japanese paper Nihon Keizai Shimbun on August 18, the author of horror novels Inugami and Yamahaha expained that she hadn’t spayed [...]
The author of a new book advocating euthanasia is outraged that 45 copies of it have been seized by Customs at Brisbane airport in Australia. Medical doctor Philip Nitschke is a controversial figure in his home country, where he has founded a euthanasia group called Exit. Defying Australia’s anti-euthanasia laws, Nitschke has personally assisted several [...]