Taipei City Government is teaming up with temples to reduce the amount of mock paper money burned during Ghost Month. Old traditions, however, die hard
By Noah Buchan
Local authorities and environmentalists are hoping to lure hard-up ghosts to the suburbs with schemes to reduce the amount of pollution caused by the burning of "ghost money," paper made to resemble bills that is immolated as an offering to inhabitants of the netherworld.

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Any self-respecting world city now needs outlandish buildings, but what about the past? Superstar architect Rem Koolhaas gets nostalgic and laments the looming demise of Beijing's 'hutongs'
By Jonathan Glancey
Rem Koolhaas has some photographs to show me. Not glossy shots of some earth-shattering new building he has created but small snaps of street life in the age-old courtyards of Beijing. Known as hutongs (胡同), these are tight webs of hodgepodge homes and alleys gathered around wells.

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Psychologists have created simulations to treat Iraq War veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder
By Amanda Schaffer
The sun shines on an empty Iraqi street. A Black Hawk helicopter circles overhead. The aromas of spices from a market fill the air.

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Denis Johnson's flawed but deeply resonant novel details the transformation of a pro-American idealist into a jaded Vietnam veteran caught in a web of intrigue
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Denis Johnson's wildly ambitious new novel, Tree of Smoke, reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on such whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green. It features a central character who comes to see himself as a combination of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and another who comes across as a latter-day version of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

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'The Immortalists' charts Charles Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel's daring quest to live forever and their enthusiasm for Nazi eugenics
By ABIGAIL ZUGER
Within a building secluded behind iron gates, in a laboratory painted black, two men in black masks and long hooded black robes stand over an operating table. One is tall and one is short, and of course they are trying to create life - any fan of horror movies knows that. But this is no movie: it is quite true, a little-known piece of early-20th-century medical history that segues seamlessly into the living horror of World War II.

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FICTION

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