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

The mall near Matthew 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...

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...

Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future.  

Francis O’Gorman shows how capitalism embraced forgetting as a requirement for modern existence and how modern education, as well as life...

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

Can the veil be an instrument of feminist empowerment? Does veiled anonymity confer a degree of power to women? Starting from her own marriage ceremony at which she first wore a full veil, Rafia Zakaria explores how the physical reality of the veil as...

A complete guide to its history, form and contexts, Superhero Comics delves into the most successful and familiar of comic book genres. Chris Gavaler discusses a wide range of topics, starting with the history of the genre, from the early “Golden Age” to blockbuster 21st-century adaptations. Throughout this history he uncovers the genre’s cultural contexts...

Airportness takes the reader on a single day's journey through all the routines and stages of an ordinary flight. From curbside to baggage, and pondering the minutes and hours of sitting in between, Christopher Schaberg contemplates the mundane world of commercial aviation to discover “the nature of flight.” For Schaberg this means hearing planes in the...

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 anti-social—the quintessential...

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...

As immediately believable as they were cartoonish, as much an inner city cipher as a suburban boys gang, the foursome that made up the Pharcyde were the most relatable MCs to ever pass the mic. On their debut and magnum opus Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde they created a record almost overstuffed with possibility, the sound of four restless man-children fresh...

Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants released one LP in 1980 and then, like their vanishing portraits on the album’s cover, disappeared. Even though Colossal Youth received positive reviews and sold surprisingly well, Young Marble Giants quickly slid into the margins of rock 'n' roll history—relegated to cult status among post-punk and indie rock fans...

What happens when your body doesn't look how it's supposed to look, or feel how it's supposed to feel, or do what it's supposed to do? Who or what defines the ideals behind these expectations? How can we challenge them and live more peacefully in our bodies?

Shameful Bodies: Religion and the Culture of Physical Improvement explores these questions by...

When Twin Peaks debuted on the ABC network on the night of April 8, 1990, thirty-five million viewers tuned in to some of the most unusual television of their lives. Centered on an eccentric, coffee-loving FBI agent’s investigation into the murder of a small town teen queen, Twin Peaks brought the aesthetic of arthouse cinema to a prime time television...

From the "War on Hippies" to the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, the story of Modern Lovers is a high octane tale of Brutalist architecture, rock 'n' roll ambition and the struggle for identity in a changing world. One of punk rock’s foundational documents, the archetype for indie obsession and all but disowned by its author, The Modern Lovers was an album...

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...

Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, Adam Weiner spans decades and continents to reveal the surprising connections between the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a relatively unknown nineteenth-century Russian author.

A congressional investigation placed the blame for the...

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people’s novels, instructor of an armored division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work was deeply informed by his long and eventful life. He...

The Jesus and Mary Chain's swooning debut Psychocandy seared through the underground and to the top of the pop charts, shifting the role of noise within pop music forever. Post-punk and pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a generation poised on the brink of revolution, establishing Creation Records as a taste making entity in the process. The...

In January of 1979, the great soul artist Donny Hathaway fell fifteen stories from a window of Manhattan’s Essex House Hotel in an alleged suicide. He was 33 years old and everyone he worked with called him a genius. Best known for “A Song for You,” “This Christmas,” and classic duets with Roberta Flack, Hathaway was a composer, pianist, and singer...

When LCD Soundsystem broke up in 2011, they left behind a small but remarkable catalog of music. On top of the genius singles and a longform composition for Nike, there was a trilogy of full-length albums. During that initial run, LCD Soundsystem—and the project's mastermind, James Murphy—were at the center of several 21st century developments in pop...

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...