Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. But more than that, it is a situation that explains time, technology, and the human body. Jet lag epitomizes the accelerated world we live in. It makes the speed and discomfort of globalization tangible on a personal level.
Tracing physiological, temporal, technological, and cultural meanings, Christopher J. Lee’s Jet Lag ponders our intrinsic human limits in the face of modern innovation, revealing the latent costs of global cosmopolitanism today.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. But more than that, it is a situation that explains time, technology, and the human body. Jet lag epitomizes the accelerated world we live in. It makes the speed and discomfort of globalization tangible on a personal level.
Tracing physiological, temporal, technological, and cultural meanings, Christopher J. Lee’s Jet Lag ponders our intrinsic human limits in the face of modern innovation, revealing the latent costs of global cosmopolitanism today.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Introduction: The Esperanto of Jet Lag
1. The Romantic Machine
2. Babel's Clock
3. Circadian Rhythm and Blues
4. Heaven Up Here
Conclusion: Jet Lag as a Way of Life
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index
Tracing physiological, temporal, technological, and cultural meanings, Christopher J. Lee’s Jet Lag ponders our intrinsic human limits in the face of modern innovation.
Christopher J. Lee is Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College, USA. He has published four previous books and travels frequently.
Lee has a gift for making surprising yet apposite associations ...
He is best, though, when contemplating the "global capitalist
spectacle" of airports, with their unifying corporate flags for
individual airlines and the ubiquitous brands displayed down
polished corridors.
*Times Literary Supplement*
In this beguiling book, Christopher J. Lee opens up the whole
panorama of jetting off, arriving, and sleeping it off. From T. S.
Eliot to Dalí, from Chaplin to Lost in Translation, he shows how
jet lag is the deep dark symptom of modern life's struggle with
time. Jet Lag is a profound and witty meditation on a key secret of
modernity.
*Enda Duffy, Arnhold Presidential Department Chair, University of
California, Santa Barbara, USA, and author of The Speed
Handbook*
Jet Lag is a revelatory and compelling meditation on the temporal
and affective dislocations of global capitalism. Christopher J. Lee
lucidly maps the dissonant incompatibility between human beings and
technological acceleration but he also insists on the importance of
our imaginative cultural and aesthetic responses to the many
systemic derangements of individual experience.
*Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory,
Columbia University, USA, and author of 24/7*
Jet Lag goes beyond the expected, leaving behind the simple science
of this curious phenomenon to explore intriguing tangents inspired
by the subject. A philosophical musing on the importance of sleep,
a short essay exploring our relationship with flying, and even a
musing upon jet lag as not only a physical phenomenon but a
spiritual one as well…. Lee manages to encompass quite a lot in
less than 200 pages, delving into the consequences of modern
convenience … Jet Lag is no mere trivia book or brief primer on the
subject; it’s one man pondering the relationship between humanity,
gravity, time, and space. Four stars.
*Tulsa Book Review*
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