Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
This book is about a strange object-strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker's Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory habits are considered alongside one another, and personal narrative and broad swaths of natural history jostle, like yolk and albumen. Mapping curious eggs across times, scales, and spaces, Egg draws...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a blue marble, a blue pale dot, or, as Chaucer described it, this litel spot of erthe, the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver's license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth's pass to regulated vice-cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom's flipside: screening. The airport's heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead,...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop there, clanking on the docks just out of sight.... 90% of the goods and materials that move around the globe do so in shipping containers. It is an absolutely ubiquitous object, even if most of us have no direct contact with it. But what is this thing? Where has it been, and where is it going? Craig Martin's book illuminates the...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Hair, a primary marker of our mammalian nature, is an extraordinary indicator of economic and social standing, political orientation, religious affiliation, marital status, and cultural leanings, among other things. The meanings of hair are deep, powerful, and so strongly embedded in cultural conditioning that they are usually understood unconsciously (and all the more strongly for that).
In untangling its myriad meanings, Scott Lowe reveals just how little we control...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A 3-year-old asks her physician father about his job, and his inability to provide a succinct and accurate answer inspires a critical look at the profession of modern medicine. In sorting through how patients, insurance companies, advertising agencies, filmmakers, and comedians misconstrue a doctor’s role, Andrew Bomback, M.D., realizes that even doctors struggle to define their profession. As the author attempts to unravel how much of doctoring is role-playing, artifice, and...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A 3-year-old asks her physician father ab...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The electric candle and faux fur, coffee substitutes and meat analogues, Obama impersonators, prosthetics. Imitation this, false that. Humans have been replacing and improving upon the real thing for millennia – from wooden toes found on Egyptian mummies to the Luxor pyramid in Las Vegas. So why do people have such disdain for so-called “fakes”? Kati Stevens's Fake discusses the strange history of imitations, as well as our ever-changing psychological and socioeconomic...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The electric candle and faux fur, coffee s...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. “You are what you eat.” Never is this truer than when we use medications, from beta blockers and aspirin to Viagra and epidurals—and especially psychotropic pills that transform our minds as well as our bodies. Meditating on how modern medicine increasingly measures out human identity not in T. S. Eliot’s proverbial coffee spoons but in 1mg-, 5mg-, or 300mg-doses, Pill traces the uncanny presence of psychiatric pills through science, medicine, autobiography, television,...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. “You are what you eat.” Never is this...
