Summer Brennan Knihy

Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste Magazine Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a woman (or, for that matter, a man) to choose to wear them? Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

The narrative follows a family-run oyster farm in California's Drakes Estero, established in the 1930s and later renamed The Drakes Bay Oyster Company. After the Point Reyes Wilderness Act designated the area for conservation, the farm's lease was threatened by the National Park Service's decision not to renew it past 2012. The local rancher, determined to preserve the farm's legacy, embarks on a legal battle that could reach the Supreme Court, highlighting themes of environmental conservation, community resilience, and the clash between nature and industry.