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To examine our emails is to examine our lives: our inboxes are anthropological goldmines, waiting to be plumbed and probed for the expansive cultural, ethical, behavioral lessons they hold.

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

Do you feel your consciousness, your attention, and your intelligence (not to mention your eyesight) being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather, corporate groupthink, commercial come-ons, and other meaningless internet flotsam? Do your work life and your social life, hideously conjoined in your inbox, drag each other down in a surreal cycle of neverending reposts, appointments, and deadlines?

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 merchants. 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. Despite its fading relevance in the lives of the younger generation in the face of an ever-changing array of apps and media, email is probably here to stay, for better or worse.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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Pre-mail

Email
Compose
Subject
Attachment
Inbox
Send
Reply-All
Delete
Junk

Out of Office: After Email
Postscript: How to Write and Read an Email

Index

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In this slyly subversive little book, part rhapsody, part diatribe, Randy Malamud can´t leave e-mail alone. His exuberant rants and riffs give us a new perspective on our infernal electronic inboxes. A fast, funny, compulsive read. Mikita Brottman, Professor of Humanistic Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art, USA, and author of An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere (2018) and The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men´s Prison (2016)

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