In progress

Hello, friends and readers and interested parties:

Just a quick word to say we’re here, and there will be news of our activities soon. We’re hard at work finalizing the lineup and other details of the Significant Objects book. We’ll have more to say and announce soon. Thank you for your patience!

Oh, and we are still doing the Twitter thing, of course. Follow us @SignificObs if you please.

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Our shop. Click to visit. More titles added all the time.

We’ve just started a “bookstore” page using Amazon Associates, where we’ll gradually be adding works by all of our 200+ contributors who have books for sale. To keep it from being too overwhelming, we’re starting with a small number (all recent releases), and adding a few new titles every weekday, so keep an eye on it. There’s a tab for the bookstore above header, and the url is: http://significantobjects.com/bookstore/.

Obviously you should buy them all to support our superlative writer crew, but it is also noteworthy that whatever you spend via our “shop,” some sliver of dough will flow to the S.O. team to help offset our expenses.

Because Significant Objects works only with the finest writers around, it is certain that all your purchases through our shop will be enjoyable and enlightening. Also, each of these books makes a fine gift, for any occasion.

Thank you.

At WIRED SCIENCE, earlier this month, science journalist Jonah Lehrer explained “something important about how the human mind calculates value.”

There’s now suggestive evidence that our faith in the authentic — especially when the authenticity is supported by effective marketing campaigns — is a deep-seated human instinct, which emerges at an extremely early age. Consider a clever experiment led by the psychologists Bruce Hood and Paul Bloom. The scientists tested 43 children between the ages of three and six. The children were shown a “copying machine” [...] A ‘‘stretchy man’’ was then placed in the box and the illusion repeated. Interestingly, the young children actually preferred the “duplicate” toy and chose it 62 percent of the time. The kids didn’t worry about the “authenticity” of the stretchy man. But Hood and Bloom didn’t stop there. They also had many of the young kids bring in their “attachment objects,” such as their favorite blanket or stuffed animal. (I still remember losing Johnny, my stuffed penguin, at the tender age of five. Grief.) The scientists then offered to “copy” the object for the kids. Four of the children simply refused — they wouldn’t let their blankie anywhere near that nefarious device. But even those kids who allowed their attachment object to be “copied” almost always refused to see the objects as equivalent. The new duplicate was a bootleg blankie, an ersatz stuffed animal. Even though the children were assured that the objects were identical, they intuitively believed that the copy wasn’t the same. It lacked a history, a bond, a sentimental attachment. It was inauthentic.

The same principle, Lehrer suggests, applies to brands: “The best brands are blankies.”

If any listeners to that broadcast have found their way here: We’ve been on a bit of a summer hiatus but will be publishing new stories (and auctions) in the fall, and look out for our book in 2011. Sign up for email updates here.

Seventeenth in an occasional series.

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From your friends at Significant Objects.

From your friends at Significant Objects.