Driver's license - Meredith Castile

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver's license has long
symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car
travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth's pass to
regulated vice-cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints,
music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become
increasingly associated with freedom's flipside: screening. The
airport's heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws.
Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver's license re-designs. The
driver's license encapsulates the contradictory values and practices of
contemporary American culture-freedom 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 The Atlantic.