It used to be that you could pull a really good hoax on people and it would take a long time to be figured out (if it was figured out at all!) And then everyone would have a good story and maybe be a little embarrassed, but not for too long. You know, like those great old stories about people like Clifford Irving faking a Howard Hughes book and Alan Conway who passed himself off as Stanley Kubrick for a while. I guess people were less cynical back then, and weren't always terrified of getting duped. "Trusting," I guess is the word. Well, not anymore. Everything gets figured out so quickly! Is it the quality of the hoaxes, or the cynicism of the hoaxed? Well, probably both. Take a look at some recent examples:

We finally got around to reading the fake gang memoir, Margaret Seltzer's Love and Consequences. While we agree with the NYT's Michiko Kakutani's assesment ("self-consciously novelistic"), we thought there was one line worth sharing: "He leaned over and gently kissed me... his lips tasted like Olde English and chronic smoke." Word up!