During the last year the National Civil Service Commission has been able to do a piece of work which seems to me to deserve particular attention as an object lesson in practical civil service reform.

An Object Lesson. By Brian Jacobson. Oil barrels at a storage facility in Jakarta, Indonesia (Supri Supri / Reuters) September 8, 2017. ... oil barrels have had many fates in the last half-century.

An object’s uses and history are also at the center of THE TABLE (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 56 pp., $19.99, ages 4 to 8), the wildly creative new picture book from Winsome Bingham and Wiley ...