Long a fixture of the country's urban landscape, Taiwan's military dependents' villages are headed for extinction. The speed of their destruction has sparked efforts to preserve aspects of their unique culture
By Ron Brownlow and Kelly Lin
Weeds are conquering the gardens, and the last elderly residents of Sanchung's Air Force First Village (空軍三重一村) are moving out. As village chairman Wang Chih-hsin (王繼新) leads a tour of his childhood home, a now-vanished world comes to life in his mind.

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Ted Nash creates jazz through the interpretation of painting and sculpture
By Nate Chinen
One morning in July, the saxophonist Ted Nash took a stroll through the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a visit studded with small realizations, in the placid hour before crowds arrive. Ann Temkin, MoMA's curator of painting and sculpture, was there to answer questions, of which Nash had a few.

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Risk of birth defects may rise with father's age
By Roni Rabin
As fathers age, the risk of abnormal offspring may rise.

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To celebrate, the National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center is holding a series of top notch performances
By Noah Buchan
The National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center (CKS Cultural Center) is turning 20 this year, and to celebrate the center will hold a series of performances by local and international acts at the National Theater and National Concert Hall. The center will also hold a 20-year retrospective on the evolution of Taiwan's foremost venue for the arts.

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'Beauty Up' is an independent-minded study of the Japanese beauty industry by an author who stubbornly refuses to see any profound significance in most of it
By Bradley Winterton
Since time immemorial human beings have adapted what nature has given. Virtually everywhere on earth it's illegal to walk around naked in public. We cook our food, live in houses, communicate via the Internet, fly around in aircraft and have sex without a thought of reproduction. For millennia women have painted their eyes and men shaved off their beards. In the last decade young men in certain affluent countries have started to beautify their faces as well (though historically this is nothing new), as well as acquiring body-piercings, toning their skin and dyeing their hair. There's nothing abnormal in any of this — the fashionable young are merely following in the steps of their ancestors in attempting endlessly to improve on nature. Human beings adapt and invent as if by instinct. It's our most distinguishing characteristic.

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Margaret MacMillan wroter 'Nixon and Mao' because their meeting is a gripping drama from the "great men" school of history, but it didn't change the world
The story of how Nixon came to meet Mao in 1972 has been told by journalists, historians and many of the principals themselves. It has been memorialized in film and mythologized as opera. "Nixon to China" must be one of the most widely understood terms of art in politics and diplomacy.

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