Driver's License

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A classic teenage fetish object, the American drivers license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youths pass to regulated vicecigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedoms flipside: screening. The airports heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws. Federally mandated, anti-terrorist drivers license re-designs. The drivers license encapsulates the contradictory values and practices of contemporary American culturefreedom and security, mobility and checkpoints, self-definition and standardization, democracy and exclusion, superficiality and intimacy, the stable self and the self in flux. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.