A cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society, The System of Objects is a tour de force—a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day.

Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence in Istanbul is the culmination of decades of omnivorous collecting that seeks to capture the city of Pamuk's youth through everyday objects: The ephemera, bric-a-brac, and clutter that adheres to every life. These particular objects are intimately tied to The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk's novel of lost love, which lends its narrative structure t...(展开全部)

David Foster Wallace, who is twenty-four years old, is a 1985 graduate of Amherst College. He is currently studying for a MFA at the university of Arizona in Tucson.(物是人非啊……)

'A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian and as serious as it is possible to be without accidentally writing a religious text. He can do anything with a piece of prose, and it is a humbling experience to see him go to work on what has passed up till now as "modern fiction". He's so modern he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him' Zadie Smith ...(展开全部)

What is a singular object? An idea, a building, a color, a sentiment, a human being. Each in turn comes under scrutiny in this exhilarating dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture today. From such singular objects, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel move on to fundamental problems of politics, identity, and aesthetics as their ...(展开全部)

What is a singular object? An idea, a building, a color, a sentiment, a human being. Each in turn comes under scrutiny in this exhilarating dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture today. From such singular objects, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel move on to fundamental problems of politics, identity, and aesthetics as their ...(展开全部)

What's the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, 'Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teach...(展开全部)

Digital objects, in their simplest form, are data. They are also a new kind of industrial object that pervades every aspect of our life today—as online videos, images, text files, e-mails, blog posts, Facebook events.Yet, despite their ubiquity, the nature of digital objects remains unclear. On the Existence of Digital Objects conducts a philosophical examination of digital obj...(展开全部)

The Social Lives of Chinese Objects is the first anthology of texts to apply Arjun Appadurai’s well-known argument on the social life of things to the discussion of artefacts made in China. The essays in this book look at objects as “things-in-motion,” a status that brings attention to the history of transmissions ensuing after the time and conditions of their production. How d...(展开全部)

The Encyclopedia of the Solar System, Third Edition—winner of the 2015 PROSE Award in Cosmology & Astronomy from the Association of American Publishers—provides a framework for understanding the origin and evolution of the solar system, historical discoveries, and details about planetary bodies and how they interact—with an astounding breadth of content and breathtaking visual ...(展开全部)