In modern Taiwan, the ancient practice of feng shui thrives as a lucrative form of risk management
By Noah Buchan
Like many Taiwanese, Jiang Bai-le (江柏樂) blames the country's economic doldrums on President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).

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In 2005, a Nobel prize-winning economist began calculating the true price tag of the Iraq war. In his new book, he reveals how a war fought in bad faith will affect us all for decades to come
By Aida Edemariam
F itful spring sunshine is warming the neo-gothic limestone of the Houses of Parliament in central London, and the knots of tourists wandering round them, but in a basement cafe on Millbank it is dark and quiet, and Joseph Stiglitz is looking as though he hasn't had quite enough sleep. For two days non-stop he has been talking - at the London School of Economic (LSE), at Chatham House (international affairs think tank), to television crews - and then he is flying to Washington to testify before Congress on the subject of his new book. Whatever their reservations, representatives will have to listen, because not many authors with the authority of Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, an academic tempered by four years on Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and another three as chief economist at the World Bank (during which time he developed an influential critique of globalization), will have written a book that so urgently redefines the terms in which to view an ongoing conflict.

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Tolerance is at the heart of equestrian troupe Zingaro's newest performance, 'Battuta,'which follows a day in the lives of gypsies with a crew from diverse backgrounds
By Lynne O'Donnell
Bartabas, enigmatic visionary behind one of the world's most spectacular circuses, says his latest equestrian extravaganza is a celebration of life that transcends nationality, religion and race.

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In 'Life Class,' the newest novel by Pat Barker, an art student and her two suitors are torn apart by World War I
By Michiko Kakutani
With her new novel, Life Class, Pat Barker returns to the subject of World War I - a subject that earned her immense acclaim in the 1990s with her Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road), an artful improvisation on the lives of the poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and their compatriots, which unfurled into a fierce meditation on the horrors of war and its psychological aftermath.

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'Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale,' the first English translation of the classic Japanese novel's full text, is nostalgic and honest about the early 20th-century performers
By Bradley Winterton
Much of Asia can still be rightly described as displaying a "massage culture." Sex, nominally disguised as massage, is offered by the attractive but impecunious young to the better-off males in establishments that have, to local eyes, nothing disreputable about them. European men discovered this age-old phenomenon with a sense of disbelief - its equivalents had long been banished, certainly in Anglo-Saxon countries, under the various manifestations of Puritanism. Thailand went on to built a tourism industry on its immemorial leisure-time habits, while in Japan the ancient structures were modified only by the arrival of general affluence. This has led to nostalgia there for the old ways, and in particular a fascination with the lifestyle and traditions of the geishas.

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