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

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 clients. 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.

Randy Malamud’s Email is written for anyone who feels their attention and their intelligence–not to mention their eyesight–being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather and meaningless internet flotsam.

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