Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Fetishized, demonized, celebrated and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a woman (or, for that matter, a man) to choose to wear them? Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. It considers this most provocative...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. But more than that, it is a situation that explains time, technology, and the human body. Jet lag epitomizes the accelerated world we live in. It makes the speed and discomfort of globalization tangible on a personal level.

Tracing physiological, temporal, technological, and cultural meanings, Christopher J. Lee's Jet...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The veil can be an instrument of feminist empowerment, and veiled anonymity can confer power to women. Starting from her own marriage ceremony at which she first wore a full veil, Rafia Zakaria examines how veils do more than they get credit for.

Part memoir and part philosophical investigation, Veil questions that what is seen is always good and free, and that what is veiled can only signal servility and subterfuge. From personal encounters with the veil in...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Desert nomads tested their vision by distinguishing a pair of stars. But we have since created more disquieting ways to test the strength of the eyes.

Reading the eye chart is an exercise in failure, since it only gets interesting when you cannot read any further. It is the opposite of interpretative reading, like one does with literature. When you have finished reading an eye chart, what exactly have you even read? From a Spanish cleric's Renaissance guide to testing...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The mall near Mat thew Newton's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state's first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center's, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A....

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The sapiens of the sea, whales are the other intelligent, social, and loquacious animal. But they seem to swim away the more people chase after them in an effort to communicate and connect. Why does the meaning of their mesmerizing songs continue to elude us? In times of unprecedented environmental and social loss, Whale Song ponders the problems facing ocean ecosystems and offers lessons from those depths for human social life and intimacy.

Object Lessons is...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to the efforts, by investors such as Bill Gates, to seek to find the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger's identity has become as malleable as that patty of protein, itself, before it is thrown on a grill. Carol Adams's Burger is a fast-paced and eclectic exploration of the history, business, cultural dynamics and gender politics of the...