France's business elite, the country's modern-day aristocracy, finds itself in the one place it never wants to be: the spotlight
By Nelson Schwartz and Katrin Bennhold
Of all the clubs in the world, the Club of 100 in France may be the most exclusive. Its ranks include leaders in business, politics and law, but it's the admission policy that really makes the Club des Cent, as it is known here, truly remarkable: only when an existing member dies is space made for a new one.

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As an entrepreneur, Sandra Boynton, one of the best-selling card creators of all time, she says she has succeeded by refusing to make money her main objective
By Phyllis Korkki
Sandra Boynton's studio, in a converted barn next to her Connecticut home, bears the milestones of her singular career: a long rack of greeting cards featuring quirkily drawn animals; a room full of small, sturdy children's books, with names like Snuggle Puppy! and Barnyard Dance!; and, upstairs, where she does much of her work, old-time radios and jukeboxes representing her more recent foray into music CDs for children.

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NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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Troubled male stars seem to enjoy more sensitive treatment from the media than female celebrities. Editors argue skewed coverage reflects readership demographics and not sexist attitudes
By Alex Williams
A video of Heath Ledger hanging out at a drug-fueled party two years before his death would seem to constitute must-see material for a tabloid entertainment show.

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In 'Last Seen in Lhasa,' Claire Scobie chronicles her seven journeys to Tibet, a fast-changing mythical world pregnant with contradiction and paradox

By Bradley Winterton
Books about Tibet form a genre all of their own. For 100 years thousands of volumes have described the challenging terrain, the esoteric monastic practices, and the exhilaration, mixed with hardship, experienced by travelers. Since the flight of the Dalai Lama to India in 1959 stories of the suffering inflicted by occupying forces, and of the near-destruction of one of the world's most distinctive and, until recently, untouched cultures, have been added.

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If, as JG Ballard maintains, this may be his last book, that's all the more reason to luxuriate in the work of one of the Britain's foremost writers
By Robert McCrum
Graham Greene once wrote that a writer's childhood is the bank at which, in later life, he will cash his creative checks. In another exploration of the writer's inspiration, he also declared, in A Sort of Life, that novelists write out of "a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order." If the extraordinary life and work of JG (Jim) Ballard is a case study of these observations, then Miracles of Life, his autobiography, is a detached commentary on a life foretold.

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