Today I'm in New York, my favorite city of sin (sorry, Vegas), so to honor my surroundings I thought I'd parcel out some goodies from our book Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History's Naughtiest Bits. First up, under the deadly sin of Pride, something Manhattanites know absolutely nothing about: World Leaders Obsessed with Their Own Images Mausolus: For 24 years, Mausolus ruled over the city-state of Halicarnassus in what is now Turkey, and he spent a lot of time... READ ON

In a development that should please AJ to no end, scientists have found a link between the pharoah Tutankhamun and the Tunguska Event (aside from their both starting with T and being impossible to spell): In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces. The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation. Working with Egyptian... READ ON

I know I joked a couple weeks ago about Amazon.com opening a church, but seems I wasn't too far off! According to today's Variety, "Amazon.com is going from peddler to producer. In its first feature-film venture, Amazon has optioned screen rights to Keith Donohue's novel "˜The Stolen Child.' Amazon will move to secure a filmmaker and then a studio partner to turn the fantasy into a live-action feature." Congrats to Keith! Another small victory for us writers. But... READ ON

In one of the happier stories that I've read today, Reuters is reporting that a Polish man unintentionally saved a 110 lb. Saint Bernard who had been thrown out of a two-story window when he walked underneath it. The man, who was definitely caught off-guard (it's hard to prepare for that sort of thing), suffered some bruises, and a little psychological shock from the incident. As for the dog, who'd been defenestrated from said window by a drunken owner, he seems to have escaped with nary a... READ ON