Waste cover art

Waste

Object Lessons
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Waste

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

Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it’s also waste—or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. Aesthetics Anthropology Environment Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Science
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Critic reviews

Fascinating, thought-provoking, and necessary, Brian Thill’s Waste is about not just our present but our future. You can’t read it and come out of the experience unchanged.
If 'waste,' as Brian Thill points out, is any object plus time, then Waste is waste plus spirited curiosity and tremendous intelligence. With a gaze full of vigor and heart, Thill looks at the fate of what we discard—from space junk to horse corpses to bird bellies split open from plastic—and illuminates invisible margins we’d often rather forget. I read the whole book in one sitting, spellbound.
Waste is the finest filth around—or really the finest mediation of it I can think of: Thill looks deeply into how what we waste controls us at the level of the personal and the public—our discards become our fate and home both—and finds treasure.
Waste pluralizes, names a condition into which objects fall, takes us beachcombing, dumpster diving. ‘Waste is every object, plus time’… The true aim of Brian Thill’s book, however, is… that non-place to which waste is sent. We cannot afford… to believe in such a zone any longer. Of course, we never really could or did — out of sight was simply out of mind. Waste always kept coming back. (Julian Yates)
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