Skateboard

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.

About the Author

Jonathan Russell Clark is a writer and critic living in the United States. He is the author of An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom (2018). His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Vulture, L.A. Times, and numerous others.

He has an MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA. He has been a theater critic in Boston, a co-founder of a shadow puppet theater company, and a guitarist in a gypsy jazz band. He has skateboarded for 27 years.