Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom - enabled by new technologies - as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Jeff Jarvis holds the Leonard Tow Chair in Journalism Innovation and directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. He was creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, a media columnist for The Guardian, and president and creative director of Advance.net. He blogs at Buzzmachine.com, cohosts the podcast This Week in Google, and is the author of five books: What Would Google Do? (2009), Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (2011), Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News (2014), and Magazine (forthcoming, 2023) in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

1. The End
2. The Beginning of the End
3. The Beginning
4. Magazines' Golden Century
5. Inside the Gilded Factory
6. Tangled in the Web
7. Next
Bibliography
Notes
Index