In his new book, “Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly” — a mix of fact and fiction — music writer and L.A. native Jeff Weiss brings us back to the last gasp of the celebrity gossip-mongering machine of the early aughts. It was the prelapsarian age of the dumb phone, when we weren’t all taking photos of everything all the time and paparazzi were commanding six figures for shots of Angelina Jolie’s baby bump.

Fresh out of college and dreaming of Pulitzer glory, Weiss instead takes a job with Star magazine — called Nova in the book — to pay his rent and winds up being present during ugly episodes of the celebrity stalking era: Britney Spears’ meteoric rise and career lows in the early 2000s, a few years before her personal and business affairs were placed under a court-ordere

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