Series: Object Lessons

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Why do we sign our names? How can a squiggle both enslave and liberate? Signatures often require a witness—as if the scrawl itself is not enough. What other kinds of beliefs and longings justify our signing practices? Signature addresses these questions as it...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. How did the skateboard go from a menacing fad to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial – perhaps even childish – especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savoury treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even...

"A unique perspective on one of the most infamous cities in recent American history." - Publisher’s Weekly "A book that sticks with you long after you’ve read it." - Volume 1 Brooklyn Hoke’s writing is blunt and honest, and Sticker is a collection worth keeping." - Southern Review of Books "I will never forget this book." - T Kira Madden,...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Stock Photo mines the significance of the stock photo in our everyday lives, from the ads and websites we browse, to the menus and memes that we consume. Through interviews with stock photography experts, photographers, models, consumers, and...

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 mum wore pearls and heels as she baked...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a triptych of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason, then, that our relationship with X-rays would...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention and force us to attend to things we've preferred to ignore. But alarms also allow us to feel secure, to sleep and to retreat from alertness. They take over vigilance on our behalf....

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Sometime in the mid-1990s, we began, often with some trepidation, to enrol for a service that promised to connect us—electronically and efficiently—to our friends and lovers, our bosses and clients. If it seemed at first like simply a change in scale (our mail...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. For over two thousand years, magnets have inspired tales of myth, magic, exploration, science, and art. From the physical to the metaphorical, our language is littered with magnetic allusions: magnetic personalities, animal magnetism, mesmerism, and magnetic attraction. We take them for granted, yet...

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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Feared and worshipped 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 enthral the public. But what harm has been caused by our...

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 mesmerising songs continue to...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. Hyphen follows the story of the hyphen from...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the ‘80s and...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. OK as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK is a...

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,...

The Best Books of 2022, The New Yorker Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its association with wealth dates back to the invention of...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Since its invention more than 150 years ago, the microphone transformed the world in an instant. Yet its evolution and integration into our daily lives has been comparatively gradual—so gradual, crucially, that it is easy to forget just how much we take it...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. From the theatre mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long served as instruments for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks—as faces—are an extension of the self....

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization’s greatest works...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When you are born, the first thing you do is scream. Be it a response to fear, anger, sadness, or happiness, the scream is a declaration of being alive. The metal vocalist cupping the microphone blares out a deafeningly harsh scream. The drill...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalisation and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organiser, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. From Revlon to Glossier, from Marilyn to Gaga, lipstick is as shape-shifting and unwieldy as femininity itself. Who wears lipstick today – as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Glasses are among the oldest and most commonplace prosthetics we have invented. But what does it mean to wear glasses? There is more to the answer than correcting vision. Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the way that we view the world, and the...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Concrete has an image problem. Portrayed as boring, cheap, and thoughtless, it is often considered synonymous with bad architecture. For many, concrete is architecture gone wrong – dogmatic, ugly, and as miserably grey as English drizzle. Stephen Parnell’s Concrete is an apologia of...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Our ability to make a fist is what distinguishes humans from every other species, including primates. The fist has played a crucial role in the birth of language and appears in nearly every form of nonverbal communication. We use our fist to protest...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The laboratory stands as a powerful symbol in the public imagination: it is a place for bodily dissections and monstrous creations, technological innovation and corporate secrecy, governments working in the public interest or government out of bounds, scientists as geniuses and saviours and...