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Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, a humanities professor has been on a crusade to reveal the many ways that graduate school is a bad idea. There are too few academic jobs for the training to be anything other than a crap-shoot. This is a problem, particularly because the hurdles to becoming a professor in America include slaving away for years on a PhD and submitting yourself to the low-wage exploitation of adjunct teaching.

Louis Menand addresses this in his new book, "The Marketplace of Ideas" (reviewed by The Economist here). He notes that whereas you can become a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four, the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine years. And then good luck finding a job.

Given all the bad news, I was initially heartened to see that the Chronicle has published a response to the original story, called "Neither a Trap Nor a Lie". Surely James Mulholland, an English professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, would offer evidence that secondary degrees in history and English aren't a fool's errand. Surely he would suggest that the economics of academia isn't so dire.  read more »

She married one of the Beatles, divorced him, married Eric Clapton, hung out with the Rolling Stones, drank with the Who, toured with Cream. Pattie Boyd has some stories. Like other Beatles plus-ones early on, she kept to the background. She occupied herself by taking Polaroid pictures, serendipitously documenting one of the most important eras of music history (her photos can be seen on her website).

After years of struggling with her past—the broken marriages and knock-on effects of a rock‘n’roll lifestyle—Boyd was able to write about her experiences. Her biography, "Wonderful Today", which debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list in 2007, begins in Kenya, where she spent her early childhood. She then recounts her modelling career in London, her time with the Beatles and her role in inspiring such songs as “Something”, “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight”. Lately Boyd has devoted herself to photography. "Through the Eyes of a Muse", a collection of personal photos from her years with George Harrison and Clapton, recently finished making a grand multi-year tour through America, Canada, Britain and Australia.

In a conversation with More Intelligent Life, Pattie Boyd spoke about her past and the way photography helped her heal.

More Intelligent Life: What convinced you to dig up the past and sort through your memories to put together "Through the Eyes of a Muse"?  read more »

Many things come easy in life to smart, beautiful women. Melissa Febos, the author of "Whip Smart", understands this. It is what allows her to nail job interviews and collect boyfriends with ease. But Febos also has gifts as a writer, including a knack for self-deflation. "Whip Smart" is a memoir about the author's four-year career as a dominatrix in a dungeon in midtown Manhattan. "An hour alone with a naked man with whom you do not intend to have sex can be a very long time," she recalls thinking on the day of her first session. Already we like her.

Now a writing instructor at SUNY Purchase College and the Gotham Writers' Workshop, Febos begins her story with her search for a job that pays better than her gigs in publishing. She was then a recent graduate of the New School university in New York, with a minor heroin habit, an inborn curiosity and a petite and curvy figure. Her neighbour, whose apartment bears such signs of sophistication as an Egon Schiele print and air-conditioning, is a dominatrix who seems to enjoy her job. The two women talk: trade secrets are shared, seeds are sown.

Febos locates the Dungeon of Mistress X through an ad in the back of the Village Voice. The place is nicer than she had expected, a sprawl of spotless dungeons outfitted with hanging cages, riding crops, paddles and coffins. Coffins? "For clients into sensory deprivation," explains Febos's superior during the tour. Ah, yes. She is hired, and her asking price will be $75 for an hour-long session, plus tips. Work starts the following Monday.  read more »

Scene: ground floor of the Royal Exchange, London, 1983, 8:30 am. The bell sounds, prompting a roar from hundreds of men wearing orange, red and blue jackets, shouting orders for all manner of financial contracts. Phones ring, clerks scribble instructions from clients and rush into the pits shouting the order and dealer's name. By noon, thousands of trades have been made; millions of dollars have been won or lost.

When outsiders observed the London Futures Exchange (LIFFE) from the balcony above, they likened the scene to a gladiator's pit or a bullring. It was a roiling, sweating, shouting and laughing manifestation of global capitalism, the market made flesh. All eyes—hundreds of them—were glued to the ticking movements of prices on the screen above the floor. Nicknamed "Maggie's boys", these traders thrived in Margaret Thatcher's England, a time when a certain rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial spirit challenged the City’s elitist status quo. They are the subject of "Day One Trader", John Sussex’s colourful book about life in the pits of the exchange in the 1980s and 1990s, before electronic trading put these men out of business. A former trader himself, Sussex was on the floor when LIFFE started in 1982, and continued on 20 years later, when the exchange was sold to Euronext and the open outcry method gave way to computerised trading. The result is a somewhat wistful account (with help from Joe Morgan, a journalist) about an era and a group of men who now seem anachronistic. On March 1st Frankfurt's stock exchange—Germany's largest—announced it would also end its traditional floor trading and move to an electronic system.  read more »

When reading Elif Batuman’s "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them", her debut book of essays, it’s easy to feel as though you are witnessing a love affair. “Half understanding” is how she describes her infatuation with Russian literature. She adores the way reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, et al, involves oscillating between visceral resonance and terrified confusion. The result is an intellectual thrill—both for her and her readers.

Batuman’s “fascination with Russianness” began casually. As a child, a first-generation Turkish-American in New Jersey, she found herself bewildered by the eccentric mannerisms of her Russian piano teacher. Mystification becomes bewitchment after she discovers an old copy of "Anna Karenina" as a teenager at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara.

“How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small—so serious and so light—so strange and so natural?” What Batuman loved about the novel is what she would later love about Russian literature in general: these seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes. For her "Anna Karenina" is “a prefect book, with an otherworldly perfection; unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a supercharged grey zone between nature and culture.” Indeed, the book's contrast echo Russia itself, that sprawling country peppered with weird little villages.  read more »

Every image is essentially an illusion—a representation of a thing, never the thing itself. For many artists the illusion is itself the art. From early trompe l’oeil paintings to Juan Munoz's close-up photographs of sleight-of-hand card tricks, artists have long shown an affinity for the ploys of grandstanding stage magicians.

"Magic Show", a newly published catalogue to accompany a travelling exhibition of the same name, explores the relationship between art and magic. Written by Jonathan Allen and Sally O'Reilly, who co-curated the show for London's Hayward Gallery, the book discerns the connection between "lowbrow" trickery and loftier manipulations.

Many of the 24 contemporary artists featured (in both the show and the book) borrow directly from iconic magic tricks. Sinta Werner's "Disjunction" plays on the idea of a disappearing act, but in this case it is the viewer who vanishes; the site-specific installation creates the effect of approaching a mirror without a reflection. Susan Hiller's "Homage to Yves Klein" is a more upbeat take on his rather dark photo-montage, "Leap into the Void" (1960). The result is a charming play on the trick of levitation.  read more »

How exciting! A brand new books podcast from The Economist! It's like Charles Dickens himself whispering sweet nothings into your ear. As Otis Redding might say, take a listen:

As an X-certificate actress, Sasha Grey perfected a thrashing sensuality far more cathartic and psychologically fraught than her moaning, grunting contemporaries. Her smouldering looks and unapologetic public appearances snared millions of mostly male fans and turned the teen porn performer into a cult figure. She is considered cool to watch.

Buoyed by her status as an underworld icon, Grey has participated in fashion spreads, starred in a Smashing Pumpkins music video and worked the talk-show circuit. Then at the age of 21 she made her first foray into “legitimate” cinema, landing the role of the laconic escort in Steven Soderbergh’s "The Girlfriend Experience". But Grey might better be suited to highbrow performance art than Hollywood glitz.

She spoke with More Intelligent Life after appearing at PERFORMA 09–a biennial performance-art festival organised by RoseLee Goldberg. She had just performed in "Case", a six-hour theatrical reading of William Gibson’s science-fiction classic "Neuromancer", arranged by Brody Condon, a performance artist, and adapted by Brandon Stosuy. She appeared in the role of Molly Millions, a clawed, mercury-eyed assassin.

Grey, who was home-schooled, retains the strange intellectual sparkle of a true autodidact. Here she considers the line between porn and performance art, the cultural appeal of pre-war Berlin and the beginnings of a new cyber-hierarchy.

More Intelligent Life: How did you get involved in this performance piece? Did they approach you with the part, or you them?  read more »

The director Michael Hoffman is a master at embellishing stories with period trappings; he has proved as much with films like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Restoration". "The Last Station", based upon Jay Parini’s 1990 biographical novel of the same name, recounts the final, tempestuous months of the life of Leo Tolstoy, incarnated on screen by Christopher Plummer. Hoffman endows this adaptation with misty steppes, waxed moustaches, peasants bundled in swaths of linen and an ample supply of those droshkies without which no character from any of Tolstoy’s own novels would have gotten very far.

Trappings aside, the plot itself is a knotted one, with almost enough characters to warrant one of those genealogical charts that Tolstoy himself so often provided. We gain access to the writer’s private life by way of Valentin Bulgakov, a naïve young scholar (played by a baby-faced James McAvoy), who is hired on as Tolstoy’s secretary. In contrast with Valentin’s vulnerability (he’s a virgin with a nervous cough), Tolstoy appears luminous, his greatness blinding, complete with a biblical white beard and gauzy robes. Upon arrival at the estate, Valentin is immediately pulled into a venomous struggle between Tolstoy’s wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), and the author's scheming disciple, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). The two vie for the rights to Tolstoy’s work: the countess is wary of seeming greedy as she grasps for her inheritance, while Vladimir, a commune leader, conspires to transform Tolstoy into an icon.  read more »

In the summer of 2007 a friend of mine forwarded me an e-mail from an artistic collective he was affiliated with here in New York City. The group was planning a “literary pilgrimage” to Cornish, New Hampshire--the purpose being to urge J.D. Salinger to make public everything he had written since he ceased publishing his work in 1965 (because surely he had written something in the intervening years). The members of this group had decided that Salinger was selfish for keeping his writings to himself, and for allegedly threatening to burn them.

Their plan was to rent a couple of cars and drive up to Cornish, find his house and deliver their message to him. This visit was to be preceded by a letter to Mr Salinger warning him of their impending visit (but leaving the date of their visit vague so that he would not know when to expect them). I read a version of their letter-an imploring manifesto asking for more of the stories that had already affected their lives so deeply.

I found this trip to be a bad idea, and I told my friend so. I recall having a spiteful little thought: that I would have preferred it if these artists had chosen some other writer, perhaps any other writer, and gone to his house to urge him never to publish anything ever again. That is a manifesto I would have enjoyed.  read more »