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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital media, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s. A flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning. The CD was killed in the 1990s - first by emphasizing its physical nature, later by removing it altogether. But today the CD persists - a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avantgarde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.From the theater mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks - as faces - are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponized and politicized, Sharrona Pearl looks at the politics of the mask, exploring how identity itself is read on this object.By exploring who we do (and do not) seek to protect through different forms of masking, Sharrona Pearl's long history of masks helps us to better understand what it is we value. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 literature and science, psychology and business, and journalism and surveillance.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors.. The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem at first a niche object-only for old fashioned cigarette smokers-in this book Jack Pendarvis explodes the lighter as something with deep history, as something with quirky episodes in cultural contexts, and as something that dances with wide ranging taboos and traditions. Pendarvis shows how the lighter tarries with the cheapest ends of consumer culture as much as it displays more profound dramas of human survival, technological advances, and aesthetics.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 that see it as holding a unique promise for new forms of interaction. Grounded in everyday examples, this book offers a series of surprising insights into how we increasingly find ourselves living in a world made of glass.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Once upon a time, the news was only 15 minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting weekly sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. If this seems a distant past, that's a measure of just how much TV has changed-and changed us. Weaving together personal memoir, social and political history, and reflecting on key moments in the history of news broadcasting and prime time entertainment, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV and illustrates what a constant companion and dominant cultural force television has been, for good and for bad, in carrying us from the McCarthy hearings and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to Mad Men, Killing Eve, and the emergence of our first reality TV president.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fog, a cloud that touches the ground, marks the fuzzy and shifting boundary of just how much (or little) we are willing to tolerate the natural world. Viewed from beyond the fog line, it is picturesque, the stuff of postcards and viral videos; yet from within it is a menace, responsible for travel delays and accidents-including the deadliest airline disaster in history-and is a vessel of terror and contagion. Stephen Spark's Fog traces the brief history of fog from the mid-19th century, when Oscar Wilde claimed that fog was invented, to the 21st-century Pacific coast, where scientists believe fog may be going extinct, to reveal a history of our conflicting desires to eliminate and appreciate fog. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Triggering severe nostalgia and denoting adventure, mystery, and glamour, the passenger train is still portrayed as the most romantic mode of transportation in history. But what does long-distance travel by train really add up to today? In 2005, after quitting not only a successful museum job, but a profession, writer A. N. Devers bought a 30-day rail pass and circumnavigated the United States (and a bit of Canada), disembarking and visiting over a dozen towns and cities, finding that the passenger car was at once adventure and a nightmare-the promise of self-discovery and renewal via train trip was only a daydream.Instead she emerged from her 8,111-mile journey with a close view of America's crumbling infrastructure and the decaying communities alongside the tracks. The train, it turns out, is a portal to what might have existed if America's rails hadn't been sold off and bought out.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 lasting effects on social norms and public space. Ranging from postwar Japan to the present, Tuhus-Dubrow tells an illuminating story about our emotional responses to technological change. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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, religious or class signifier. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from the scriptures to modern pop culture, Bread tells the story of how this ancient and everyday object serves as a symbol for both social communion and social exclusion.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 "development of containerization"-including design history, standardization, aesthetics, and a surprising speculative discussion of the futurity of shipping containers.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence. With a shrewd eye toward this particular moment in the history of books, Pyne takes the reader on a tour of the bookshelf that leads critically to this juncture: amid rumors of the death of book culture, why is the life of the bookshelf in full bloom?Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Feared and worshiped in equal measure, snakes have captured the imagination of poets, painters, and philosophers for centuries. From Ice Age cave drawings to Snakes on a Plane, this creature continues to enthrall the public. But what harm has been caused by our mythologizing? While considering the dangers of stigma, Erica Wright moves from art and pop culture to religion, fetish, and ecologic disaster. This book considers how the snake has become more symbol than animal, a metaphor for how we treat whatever scares us the most, whether or not our panic is justified.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.In an election year, political signs can be impossible to avoid. They're in front yards, on bumper stickers, and in some places you might never have expected. Tobias Carroll chronicles the permutations and secret histories of political signs, venturing into the story of how they came to be and illuminating how the signs around us shape us in ways we often fail to appreciate. In an era of political polarization and heated debate, what can be learned from studying how our personal space becomes the setting for both? Understanding political signs can help us understand our current political moment, and how we might transcend it.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Exits are all around us. They are the difference between travelling and arriving, being on the inside or outside. Whether signposted or subversive, personal or political, choices or holes we've fallen through, exits determine how we move around our lives, cities, and the world. What does it really mean to 'exit'? In these meditations on exits in architecture, transport, ancestry, language, garbage, death, Sesame Street and Brexit, Laura Waddell follows the neon and the pictograms of exit signs to see what's on the other side. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility: where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us? But Coffee is about more than coffee: it's a personal history and a promise to self; in her confrontation with the hours (with time--big picture, little picture), Dinah Lenney faces head-on the challenges of growing older and carrying on. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

The magnet has been in existence for more than 13 billion years, born just after the big bang. Magnets were used by ancient cultures for architecture, alignment and art. They are in MRIs, maglev trains, tape recorders, and other technologies. From the physical to the metaphorical, our language is littered with magnetic allusions: magnetic personalities, animal magnetism, Mesmerism. Since humans began to write about it two thousand years ago, the magnet has inspired tales of myth, magic, exploration, science, and art. Eva Barbarossa weaves together these stories of ancient and modern wonders, of discovery and creation, of madness and desire, of beauty and awe, taking us from the spectacle of the aurora borealis to the disastrous searches for magnetic north.

Hashtags silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, as well as in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it.Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or celebrity power users, the story of the hashtag is much more interesting and surprising, speaking to how we think about naming, identity, and ownership.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, we began, often with some trepidation, to enroll for a service that promised to connect us?electronically and efficiently?to our friends and lovers, our bosses and merchants. If it seemed at first like simply a change in scale (our mail would be faster, cheaper, more easily distributed to large groups), we now realize that email entails a more fundamental alteration in our communicative consciousness. Despite its fading relevance in the lives of the younger generation in the face of an ever-changing array of apps and media, email is probably here to stay, for better or worse.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Baked potatoes, Bombay potatoes, pommes frites . . . everyone eats potatoes, but what do they mean? To the United Nations they mean global food security (potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop). To 18th-century philosophers they promised happiness. Nutritionists warn that too many increase your risk of hypertension. For the poet Seamus Heaney they conjured up both his mother and the 19th-century Irish famine. What stories lie behind the ordinary potato? The potato is entangled with the birth of the liberal state and the idea that individuals, rather than communities, should form the building blocks of society. Potatoes also speak about family, and our quest for communion with the universe. Thinking about potatoes turns out to be a good way of thinking about some of the important tensions in our world. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 France (where it is banned) to Iran (where it is compulsory), Zakaria shows how the garment's reputation as a pre-modern relic is fraught and up for grabs. The veil is an object in constant transformation, whose myriad meanings challenge the absolute truths of patriarchy. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 together surprising perspectives on this common object-egg as food, as art object, as metaphor and feminist symbol, as cultural icon.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world. Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures, and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The open-access edition of this text was made possible by a Philip Leverhulme Prize from The Leverhulme Trust.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. Ranging from ancient Rome and the 'watchwords' of military encampments, through the three-factor authentication systems of Harry Potter and up to the biometric scanner in the iPhone, Password makes a timely and important contribution to our understanding of the words, phrases and special characters that determine our belonging and, often, our being.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways-as keel, lodgepole, and execution site-and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. In this book Matthew Battles follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world ("for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"). This book treats one of the most mundane and familiar phenomena, showing how it can provide a key to thinking about existence, community, and justice today.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. From its origins in the late 19th century to its decline in the 21st, Sheila Liming's Office narrates a cultural history of a place that has arguably been the primary site of labor in the postmodern economy. During the post-war decades of the 20th century, the office rose to prominence in culture, achieving an iconic status that is reflected in television, film, literature, and throughout the history of advertising. Most people are well versed in the clichés of office culture, despite evidence that an increasing number of us no longer work in offices. With the development of computing technology in the 1980s and 90s, the office underwent many changes. Microsoft debuted its suite of multitasking applications known as Microsoft Office in 1989, firing the first shot in the war for the office's survival. This book therefore poses the question: how did culture become organized around the idea of the office, and how will it change if the office become extinct?Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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 modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.What is this elusive object, the environment, that impacts us so profoundly--our odds to be born; the way we look, feel and function; and how long and comfortable we may live? A quest for a definition inevitably leads one to the startling revelation that the environment includes us: it is not only everything we see around us but also, at a lesser scale, a hailstorm of molecules large and small that constantly penetrates our bodies, simultaneously nourishing and threatening our health. The concept of oneness with our surroundings urges a reckoning of what we are doing to 'the environment,' and consequently, what we are doing to ourselves. By taking us through this journey of questioning, Rolf Halder's Environment empowers readers with new knowledge and a heightened appreciation of how our daily lifestyle decisions are impacting the places we occupy, our health, and humanity's prospect of survival.With illustrations by Griffin Finke.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.