Kalyani Tupkary

I n eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world.  Extinct  is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never

The design of our calendars — the way we arrange our days, weeks, and months — is a reflection of how we aspire to live our lives

our biology is tethered to the sun, yet the clocks society uses to keep time are influenced by a tangled web of political and historical factors.

But while nature may mete out time’s passage in these horological devices, it takes human observation of the heavens to set them. Even the most precise atomic clock must be periodically tweaked to account for variations in the earth’s rotation. Some clocks, however, are tuned more directly to nature.