Discount Applicable

Hope, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, is the thing with feathers. Erik Anderson, on the other hand, regards our obsession with birds as too sent...

We are born into blankets. They keep us alive and they cover us in death. We pull and tug on blankets to see us through the night or an illness. Th...

Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another ...

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 al...

The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such a...

Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors… The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across t...

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...

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 ...

A 3-year-old asks her physician father about his job, and his inability to provide a succinct and accurate answer inspires a critical look at the p...

A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver's license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel...

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 ar...

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 pa...

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 “blu...

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 rel...

Sometime in the mid-1990s we began, often with some trepidation, to enroll for a service that promised to connect us--electronically and efficientl...

What is the environment, this elusive object that impacts us so profoundly--our odds to be born; the way we look, feel, and function; and how long ...

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 ey...

The electric candle and faux fur, coffee substitutes and meat analogues, Obama impersonators, prosthetics. Imitation this, false that. Humans have ...

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 f...

Harry Brown explores the composition, history, kinetic life, and the long deterioration of golf balls, which as it turns out may outlive their hitt...

Hair, a primary marker of our mammalian nature, is an extraordinary indicator of economic and social standing, political orientation, religious aff...

Hashtags can silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, and find voice i...

Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they...

We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in o...

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 a...

You can't think about travel without thinking about luggage. And baggage has baggage. Susan Harlan takes readers on a journey with the suitcases th...

For over two thousand years magnets have inspired tales of myth, magic, exploration, science, and art. From the physical to the metaphorical, our l...

The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our r...

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...

When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of their choice, anytime, ...

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 ...

“You are what you eat.” Never is this truer than when we use medications, from beta blockers and aspirin to Viagra and epidurals–and especially psy...

Baked potatoes, Bombay potatoes, pommes frites... everyone eats potatoes, but what do they mean? To the United Nations they mean global food securi...

It may be responsible for a greater improvement in human diet and longevity than any other technology of the last two thousand years-but have you e...

While we all use remote controls, we understand little about their history or their impact on our daily lives. Caetlin Benson-Allot looks back on t...

It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how t...

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,...

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 ...

What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a pu...

Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history, con...

For as long as people have traveled to distant lands, they have brought home objects to certify the journey. More than mere merchandise, these trav...

Speed. Bump. Speed. Traffic considers the history and philosophy of roundabouts, speed bumps, the pedestrian mall, and other efforts to manage traf...

Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower over us...

The veil can be an instrument of feminist empowerment, and veiled anonymity can confer power to women. Starting from her own marriage ceremony at w...

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 n...

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 the...