Private temples, like The Palace of Holy Baby Spirits, offer ceremonies that promise to placate the spirits of aborted fetuses and ease the guilt and anxiety of the women who had them
By Noah Buchan
Yang Chih-fu (楊智富), a feng shui specialist and businessman, provides special services mainly for women. Young women, to be precise.

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The 95-year-old has witnessed almost a century of American life; more importantly, he has participated as an activist, writer, actor and radio show host
By Gary Younge
About 25 years ago, Studs Terkel was waiting for a number 146 bus alongside two well-groomed business types. "This was before the term yuppie was used," he explains. "But that was what they were. He was in Brooks Brothers and Gucci shoes and carrying the Wall Street Journal under his arm. She was a looker. I mean stunning - Bloomingdales and Neiman Marcus and carrying Vanity Fair."

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Tod Wodicka mines the rich vein of dysfunctional America to comic effect in an eccentric story that is full of compassion and tinged with sadness
By Janet Maslin
Tod Wodicka has said that he began his debut novel in a spirit of satire and then let it deepen into something else. The wisdom of that approach is borne out by this tender, oddball book, one that performs a deft balancing act as it hides love, yearning and regret behind the mouthful of medieval incantation in its title.

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FICTION

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Though Taipei's Lunar New Year shopping festival does serve the practical purpose of selling wares for the holiday, it also offers history lessons, clothing and tourist attractions
By Ho Yi
Myriad customers, even more goods and a rare peak of sunshine set the scene on Dihua Street (迪化街) last Friday afternoon. This traditional market isn't the only place to buy New Year's necessities: Ningxia Night Market (寧夏夜市), Taipei City Mall (台北地下街) and other commercial venues are part of the Taipei Big Street New Year Shopping Festival (台北年貨大街).

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'Pink and Grey,' a play about transsexual people in Turkey sheds light on the group in a mainly Muslim country
By Sibel Utku Bila
A unique play in an Ankara theater ended with a standing ovation this week as the little-known actors - transsexuals and homosexuals raising their voices against discrimination - fought back tears on stage.

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The newest in a spate of anti-religious books was written by a mathematician, which explains why it quickly digresses into arguments best left to the stoned
By Michiko Kakutani
Sam Harris' 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, set off a noisy boomlet of anti-religion books, including Richard Dawkins' provocative if preachy tome, The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens' furious (and often very funny) jeremiad, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. These books provided a vehement response to the growing influence of evangelicals in American politics and the raging fires of fundamentalism around the world, and they even led to talk about the stirrings of a "new atheist" movement.

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