Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas offers suggestions for revamping liberal education at a time when the liberal arts seem increasingly irrelevant to incoming freshmen. Andrew Scull's notorious hatchet job "UCSD letter" and other imbroglios are signs of the hazardous times. Trained as a historian and working as an English professor, Menand digs up fascinating history and proffers bits of insider gossip. Nonetheless, he falls short with an "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude,arguing that market forces (one can infer, a hybrid corporate-university model) stimulates competition and innovation in an academic culture which he views as mostly stagnant and out of touch with "real" societal concerns. Indeed the first line of his book is: "Knowledge is our most important business," he writes, noting that the "value-added" component of a college education is lost when "most of th[e] esoterica [of a professor's knowledge] is available instantly on Wikipedia" (19). He also seems to imply that women, minorities, and the 1980s "culture wars" instituted the decline in Academic culture away from its mission of disinterested research and non-ideological, or apolitical, vetting and debate. Read More.>>

While the artist Tehching Hsieh has enjoyed some resurgent interest in his work through the Museum of Modern Art's "Performance" series and the Guggenheim's "Third Mind" exhibition, it is with the publication of Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh that a truly satisfactory and in-depth resource for engaging his art has emerged. Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist who carried out six major durational performances after immigrating to the United States in 1974, five of which lasted for one year and the final of which lasted thirteen. For each performance, Hsieh would develop a highly restrictive set of rules and a means of documenting his adherence to them, then release these as a statement of intent and invite audiences to view his work on select dates throughout the year. These performances were endurance acts of spatial and temporal constraint, all characterized by an astounding formal minimalism: the first confined him to his imagination as he sat inside a cell in his studio space; another bound him and the artist, Linda Montano, with an eight foot rope that remained their only source of contact. For an artist whose work has remained a touchstone for many students of performance and body art, it's surprising that Out of Now is the first sustained examination of Hsieh's durational works.>>