Edward Tenner

  Home   Books/Essays   Speaking    


The Life of Chairs

Chairs are in many experts' view unhealthy, yet they have been displacing other seating customs around the world. That is partly because well-being and comfort have been less important than image and self-concept, even in the high modernism of the twentieth century.




Selected Works

Books
Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology
Humanity remaking itself through technology
Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
The self-cancelling, self-frustrating side of human ingenuity, and what to do about it.
Books/Essays
The French Connections
The U.S. military-industrial complex's surprising debt to France.
Magazine Articles
When Systems Fracture On the tendency of advanced technology to promote self-deception
A review of James R. Chiles, Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology in Harvard Magazine
The Life of Chairs
How sitting customs have affected the human body
The Xanadu Effect
Are big structures harbingers of decline?
Lasting Impressions
Harvard's debt to the shoe industry
Environment for Genius
The Harvard Society of Fellows, a history and personal appreciation


Find Authors

Created by The Authors Guild

A note for users of older versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, or AOL:
This site will look a lot better in a newer browser. Download one for free!
Internet Explorer: Windows Mac   |   Netscape: Windows Mac Other
For AOL users, please choose Internet Explorer above.