Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture. It turns out that drones are not as scary as they appear—but they are more complicated than you might expect. Drones reveal the strange relationships that humans are forming with their new technologies. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Astronaut Luggage is a collection of short texts written along the last years and circulated online, rearranged around five main topics: the Apocalypse, commodities, drones, history and politics. Adopting the forms of the essay and the short story, Rothstein sets himself in an "atemporality" that allows him to tell stories in which the distinction between reality and fiction is not important. As he writes in the introduction: "None of these stories are true, but none of them are false, either. These distinctions are not the point, at least not immediately. The difference between fact and fantasy are important, just not right here and now. In an atemporal dimension, all of these things happen simultaneously. Whether for good or ill, the speculation of these stories is speculation that occurs in the midst of this world, not outside of it." Adam Rothstein is an insurgent archivist and artist. He writes about politics, media, art, and technology wherever he can get a signal.