Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about
the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Fog, a cloud that touches the ground, marks the fuzzy and shifting
boundary of just how much (or little) we are willing to tolerate the
natural world. Viewed from beyond the fog line, it is picturesque, the
stuff of postcards and viral videos; yet from within it is a menace,
responsible for travel delays and accidents-including the deadliest
airline disaster in history-and is a vessel of terror and contagion.
Stephen Spark's Fog traces the brief history of fog from the mid-19th
century, when Oscar Wilde claimed that fog was invented, to the
21st-century Pacific coast, where scientists believe fog may be going
extinct, to reveal a history of our conflicting desires to eliminate and
appreciate fog.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The
Atlantic.