Scott Cutler Shershow Christopher Schaberg Ian Bogost
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Bread is an object that is always in process of becoming something else: flower to grain, grain to dough, dough to loaf, loaf to crumb. Bread is also often a figure or vehicle of social cohesion: from the homely image of "breaking bread together" to the mysteries of the Eucharist. But bread also commonly figures in social conflict - sometimes literally, in the "bread riots" that punctuate European history, and sometimes figuratively, in the ways bread operates as ethnic,...
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.
What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a punishment, as the voice of God, as a terrorist's final weapon, as a luxury good, as the reason for torture-in short, as an object we both do and do not recognize. Concluding with the prospects for its future in a world burgeoning with noise, Biguenet asks whether we should desire or fear silence-or if it is even ours to...
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.
Pause and look around: you will see that you are surrounded by glass. It reflects and refracts light through your windows; it encircles a glowing filament above you; it's in a mirror hanging on the wall; it lies shattered in a dented corner of an iPhone-you're drinking water out of a pint glass. Taking up a most common object, rarely considered because assumed to be transparent, John Garrison draws evocative connections between historical depictions of glass and emerging visions...
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.
It may be responsible for a greater improvement in human diet and longevity than any other technology of the last two thousand years-but have you ever thought seriously about your refrigerator? That box humming in the background displays more than you might expect, even who you are and the society in which you live. Jonathan Rees examines the past, present, and future of the household refrigerator with the aim of preventing its users from ever taking it for granted again. No...
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.
Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it's also waste-or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated...
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.
During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy...hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these...
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.
Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of "the form as form," from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By asking questions about the questions we ask ourselves, Kindley uncovers surprising connections between...
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.
Where does a password end and an identity begin? A person might be more than his chosen ten-character combination, but does a bank know that? Or an email provider? What's an 'identity theft' in the digital age if not the unauthorized use of a password? In untangling the histories, cultural contexts and philosophies of the password, Martin Paul Eve explores how 'what we know' became 'who we are', revealing how the modern notion of identity has been shaped by the password....
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
How filling life with play-whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds-forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient age Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the...
How filling life with play-whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds-forges a new path for creativity and joy...
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow Christopher Schaberg Ian Bogost
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of their choice, anytime, anywhere. But the Walkman was also denounced as self-indulgent and antisocial--the quintessential accessory for the "me" generation.
In Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow takes us back to the birth of the device, exploring legal battles over credit for its invention, its ambivalent reception in 1980s America, and its...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.