"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 email provider? What's an 'identity theft' in the digital age if not the unauthorized use of a password? In untangling the histories, cultural contexts and philosophies of the password, Martin Paul Eve explores how 'what we know' became 'who we are', revealing how the modern notion of identity has been...

"Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What exactly is jet lag? And, more importantly, how do we live with jet lag? Christopher J. Lee's book introduces jet lag as an object of study, tracing medical, temporal, and technological approaches for understanding this strange, hidden cost of our populist cosmopolitanism today. Drawing upon personal experience and an array of cultural registers,...

" Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. From a young age, Matthew Newton understood that the shopping mall offered visitors far more than a collection of stores, it was a place of curiosity, ritual, and fantasy. The mall near Newton's childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-the state's first enclosed shopping mall, and the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero's zombie opus...

Speed. Bump. Speed. Traffic considers the history and philosophy of roundabouts, speed bumps, the pedestrian mall, and other efforts to manage traffic. Exploring ways to reign in the power of the internal combustion engine, ramp back century-long efforts to increase the flows of traffic, and establish greater balance between humans and machines, Paul Josephson considers the history of traffic, and the political and other controversies that frame the...

"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 elude us? In times of unprecedented environmental and social loss, Whale Song ponders the problems facing ocean ecosystems and offers lessons from those depths for human social life and intimacy."--Dust...

Hashtags silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, as well as in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it. Celebration and criticism of hashtag activism rarely addresses the hashtag itself as an object or tries to locate its...

"Nothing's bulletproof," the salesman said. "The thing's only bullet resistant." The New York Times journalist Kenneth R. Rosen had just purchased his first bulletproof vest and was headed off on assignment. He was travelling into Mosul, Iraq, when he realized that the idea of a bulletproof vest is more effective than the vest itself. From its very inception, poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, or Kevlar, was meant for tires. Its humble roots and...