Email

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 enroll 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 would be faster, cheaper, more easily distributed to large groups), we now realize that email entails a more fundamental alteration in our communicative consciousness.

Randy Malamud's Email is written for anyone who feels their attention and their intelligence--not to mention their eyesight--being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather and meaningless internet flotsam. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.