The objects in our everyday lives have an annoying inability to appear in two places at once. Leave your keys in your jacket, and they won’t also be on the hook by the front door. This isn’t surprising—these objects have no uncharted abilities or virtues. They’re profoundly ordinary. Yet these mundane things are composed of a galaxy of the unfamiliar. Your house keys are a temporary alliance of a trillion trillion atoms, each forged in a dying star eons ago, each falling to Earth in its earliest days. They have bathed in the light of a violent young sun. They have witnessed the entire history
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