Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Once upon a time, the news was only 15 minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting the weekly showing of sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. The revelation that answers were fed to contestants on quiz shows was a national scandal, and the Vietnam War and JFK's assassination were unprecedented eruptions of real-time disaster into the placid televisual world. If this seems a distant past, that's a measure of just how much TV has changed and changed us.
Weaving together personal memoir, social and political history, and reflecting on key moments in the history of news broadcasting and prime time entertainment, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV and illustrates what a constant companion and dominant cultural force television has been, for good and for bad, in carrying us from the McCarthy hearings and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to Mad Men, Killing Eve, and other challenges to the mythology of post-war suburbia and the emergence of our first "reality tv president."
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
