Keys

A history of who gets let in and who decides, from a wooden bolt in an Assyrian palace to the face scanner in an office lobby. Eighteen chapters, each built around one object: a Roman key worn as a ring, a curfew bell, a locksmith’s masterpiece, a padlock that sat unpicked in a London shop window for sixty-one years, the certificate Chinese laborers were made to carry, a thumbprint, a zoning map, a redlining form, a credit score, a house key on a string, a velvet rope, a password file, a paywall. The book makes one claim. Every barrier is somebody’s guess about a kind of person, and the people it lets through do not notice it is there. Along the way it checks the famous stories about locks and says which ones do not hold up. Threshold, Book One. Chapter One is free.

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