Earth

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

Earth is at once too large and too small. It exceeds human scale, and yet even medieval manuscripts depict the earth as a sphere suspended in space, as if the planet could be known from its outside, could be diminished into a human point of view. We know two contradictory things about the Earth: that it is a “blue marble” or “pale blue dot” that sails serenely through space, an object in solitude; and that it is the ground upon which we walk, think, and live-a sphere in motion that trembles with seismic activity and roars with fire, emanations from a core we cannot visit. Through the collaboration of a literary humanist and a planetary scientist, this book examines the possibilities and the limitations of the Earth figured as an object that we can view from the outside but that retains its mysteries deep within.

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

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor of English and Director of the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University, USA. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015) and Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (2015; edited with Lowell Duckert).

Linda T. Elkins-Tanton is Foundation Professor and Director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, USA. She is the author of a six-book series The Solar System (1st edition 2006; 2nd edition 2010) and co-editor, with A. Schmidt and K. Fristad, of Volcanism and Global Environmental Change (2015). Her articles have been published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Nature Geoscience, Nature, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Astrophysical Journal, among other publications.