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What is it that gives us such delight in hoaxing the gullible?The April Fool perpetrated by Burger King who advertised they were to produce left-handed hamburgers for the 32 million left-handed Americans. They were inundated with eager buyers...The famous BBC TV 'Spaghetti Tree' hoax...The outrage caused by Taco Bell's announcement that they had purchased the Liberty Bell and henceforth it would be known as the 'Taco Liberty Bell' ... Taken from the website www.museumofhoaxes.com this is a hilarious collection of hoaxes which proves just how gullible human beings are.
Judith Herbst looks at some of history's most famous hoaxes and publicity stunts, including fairy photographs, moon-men, lost tribes, and crop circles.
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax - a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and triggered fierce and wide-ranging controversy. Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. In Beyond the Hoax he turns his attention t...
Read about hoaxes and lies that have been spread in both the past and present, and learn how they have deceived people. Readers will discover tips on how to identify a hoax and learn to think critically about the information they hear every day.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An NPR Best Book of the Year “A thorough and damning exploration of the incestuous relationship between Trump and his favorite channel.” —The New York Times “A Rosetta Stone for stuff about this presidency that doesn’t otherwise make sense to normal humans.” —Rachel Maddow, MSNBC “Stelter’s critique goes beyond salacious tidbits about extramarital affairs (though there are plenty of those) to expose a collusion that threatens the pillars of our democracy.” —The Washington Post The urgent and untold story of the collusion between Fox News and Donald Trump from the New York Times bestselling author of Top of the Morning. While other leade...
The best fakes and hoaxes have just enough truth to lure people into the deception. This comprehensive book showcases some infamous hoaxes as well as supposed-hoaxes that people wont stop believingBigfoot, anyone? Theres so much to explore, from ancient lore of fairies and sea monsters to modern-day hoax baseball players and superhumans! Each high-interest subject is paired with imaginative images and colorful photographs. Mysterious Facts boxes list further points of proof. Readers will especially find a chapter on Internet hoaxes and digital forgeries applicable to their lives.
Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity. These writers were, in other words, literary usurpers and appropriators who trafficked in what Christopher L. Miller terms the “intercultural hoax.” In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy’s Sarah are two infamous examples. Miller’s contribution is to study hoaxes beyond our borders, employing a comparative fr...
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction “There Kevin Young goes again, giving us books we greatly need, cleverly disguised as books we merely want. Unexpectedly essential.”—Marlon James Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue’s gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers—from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious Ameri...
What do the Trojan Horse, Piltdown Man, Keely Motor Company, and Ponzi Scheme have in common? They were all famous hoaxes, carefully designed and bolstered with false evidence. The con artists in this book pursued a variety of ambitions—making money, winning wars, mocking authority, finding fame, trading an ordinary life for a glamorous one—but they all chose the lowest, fastest road to get there. Every hoax is a curtain, and behind it is a deceiver operating levers and smoke machines to make us see what is not there and miss what is. As P.T. Barnum knew, you can short-circuit critical thinking in any century by telling people what they want to hear. Most scams operate on a personal scale, but some have shaped the balance of world power, inspired explorers to sail uncharted seas, derailed scientific progress, or caused terrible massacres. A HISTORY OF AMBITION IN 50 HOAXES guides us through a rogue’s gallery of hustlers, liars, swindlers, imposters, scammers, pretenders, and cheats. In Gale Eaton’s wide-ranging synthesis, the history of deception is a colorful tour, with surprising insights behind every curtain. Fountas & Pinnell Level Z+