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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 »

A man of good taste, we always knew. (See the third photo down on his journal.) Mr Byrne, the feeling is mutual.

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 »

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 »

Many in publishing hope the iPad will offer such a fine way of accessing information that people will actually pay for it again. Wouldn't that be nice? But in this era of user-driven content, when everyone seems to prefer the half-baked comments of their peers over a fact-checked article by a paid journalist (the few who still roam the earth), that seems unlikely. Why buy the cow when you only want a little semi-skim for your morning coffee, anyway?

This video exchange (below) with Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, is interesting for the way it raises more questions than answers about the changing landscape of journalism. The value of information as a commodity is clearly only getting trickier to measure.

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:

Remember burying a time-capsule as a kid? These care packages to our future selves usually included a letter and any valuable possessions we could bear to part with: stickers, a mood ring, a key chain. How much would you pay for that mossy stuff now, and the letter explaining them? How much would those objects be worth to a stranger? The value of such things is complicated, and largely subjective. This is why I still have my Breyer horse collection, and why I would pay real money to have any of those time-capsules back.  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 »

In a recent blog post, James McGirk wondered whether it was possible to rank writing programmes. What metric would we use? He considered the controversy over Seth Abramson's ranking of the top-50 post-graduate writing programmes for 2010 (published in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of Poets & Writers magazine), and came away suspecting that Abramson was perhaps "a better poet than statistician".

Seth Abramson took issue with quite a few aspects of McGirk's post. Here is his response in full (which spam barriers prevented him from filing as a comment; where were those filters for all those folks trying to sell cheap Ugg boots?):

James,  read more »

I admit it. I subscribe to US Weekly. I’ll even confess that nothing seems to lull me into such a relaxed a state of bliss as those cheap, glossy pages. I feel a little guilty that I take such joy in reading about the trials and tribulations of people more glamorous and wealthy than me. But really, it is a fundamental part of our nature to revel in such things. What could be more deliciously, awkwardly visceral than Schadenfreude?

But I have my limits. I prefer intrigue to tragedy; romantic mishaps over illness or death. We often learn from gawking at the misfortunes of others, such as how to behave, when to use a paper shredder and what not to wear. For some, reading about the bad diets and cruel divorces of the rich and famous inspires better choices in one's own life. This public-service element was surely the motivation behind "Trial & Heirs: Famous Fortune Fights!", a new book by Danielle and Andrew Mayoras ("legacy expert attorneys"), which "not only chronicles some of the most highly publicised will and estate battles of several recently deceased
celebrities, it also offers expert advice to help anyone, celebs and non-celebs alike, to avoid similar problems with their estate and will planning," according to a press release delivered to the More Intelligent Life desk today.

Naturally, the book offers advice we can all use:

• Make sure you don't set up a trust for your loved ones to keep your affairs private, only to let the plan fail because the trust wasn’t funded... like Michael Jackson.

• Try not to write instructions that promise property worth millions to your cherished godchildren, only to have those wishes completely ignored and kept secret... like Princess Diana.  read more »