Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.“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 psychotropic pills that transform our minds as well as our bodies.Meditating on how modern medicine increasingly measures out human identity not in T. S. Eliot's proverbial coffee spoons but in 1mg-, 5mg-, or 300mg-doses, Pi...

The reactions evoked by images of and stories about Brad Pitt are many and wide-ranging: while one person might swoon or exclaim, another rolls his eyes or groans. How a single figure provokes such strong, often opposing emotions is a puzzle, one elegantly explored and perhaps even solved by Deconstructing Brad Pitt.Co-editors Christopher Schaberg and Robert Bennett have shaped a book that is not simply a multifaceted analysis of Brad Pitt as an actor and as a celebrity, b...