Object Lessons

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...

Bloomsbury presents… Coffee by Dinah Lenney read by Lisa Rost-Welling 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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver’s license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents...

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...

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...

Bloomsbury presents Football by Mark Yakich, read by Josh Wichard. Object Lessons is a series of short books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When is the “beautiful game” at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives?...

Bloomsbury presents… Shipping Container by Craig Martin read by Matthew Biddulph 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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment...

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 place for bodily dissections and monstrous creations, technological innovation and corporate secrecy, governments...

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 –...

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...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. We live with wallpaper not only indoors, but also in art, cinema, fashion, video games, and in our desktops and smart phones. A papered wall can represent a kind of unrelenting screen time...