Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. How did the skateboard go from a menacing fad to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide juggernaut possible. Skateboarders are their own historians, which means the real history of skating exists not in archives or texts but in a hodgepodge of random and iconic videos, tattered photographs, and, mostly, in the blurry memories of the people who lived through it all. From California beaches to Tokyo 2020, the skateboard has outlasted its critics to form a global community of creativity, camaraderie, and unceasing progression. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic . “This book is super tiny and will fit in the back pocket of some too-big-for-you jeans. . . . If you were the smart kid in your high school English class, read Skateboard.” ― Jenkem Magazine “ Skateboard is zippy, poetic, and playful, yet grounded in history. And what a fascinating history it is! Clark moves with great and joyful agility between his profiles of pro-skaters and his meditations on the technologies that transformed skateboarding from a hobby into an artform.” ― Merve Emre, Associate Professor of English, University of Oxford, UK, and contributing writer at The New Yorker Jonathan Russell Clark is a writer and critic living in the United States. He is the author of Skateboard in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series (2022) and An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom (2018). He has written about film for Esquire, LitHub, and Read It Forward . He has also written for the New York Times Book Review , L.A. Times , Boston Globe, and others. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016). Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.