Kalyani Tupkary

To underscore their modernity, filing cabinets were called ‘equipment,’ ‘appliances,’ and ‘machines’ — not furniture.

Pemmaraju’s story urges us to consider the occasional senses of temporal dislocation that we all experience from time to time—instances of timecode drift within our consciousness, small insurgencies of slave clocks against a tyrannical master clock.

While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored. This is no small matter: graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information.*

For most of recorded history, people have thought of people as the only ones that were someone. Well, they used to talk to Rocks, Rivers, and Trees, but they long forgot to do that ever since. This is a book about thinking about how the world is to all the someone’s that aren’t like you and I.

The timeline seems among the most inescapable metaphors we have. And yet, in its modern form, with a single axis and a regular, measured distribution of dates, it is a relatively recent invention. Understood in this strict sense, the timeline is not even 250 years old. How this could be possible, what alternatives existed before, and what