Paola Antonelli has posted a fantastic interview with Core-fave Rob Walker. They discuss Significant Objects, a runaway literary project about how objects in the real world become significant through the telling of a good story.

Here's a tip-top excerpt; read the entire thing here.

PA - You knew this was coming: do you have a favorite object?

RW - Yes, it's hard to answer and I give different and inconsistent responses when I'm asked this. One answer is my wedding ring, but the problem with that answer is that there isn't a great to elaborate on. So here's another answer. There's a book I have that used to belong to my father--it's called A Handbook For Writing, and it's just an old textbook, with a very plain cloth cover. On the back, my father, as a bored student evidently, drew a picture of a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit. I was absolutely thunderstruck by this when I first encountered it. I was a sullen twelve years old or so, and I couldn't believe that a) here was evidence of my father, a very upright fellow, having goofed off, and b) the drawing is quite good. His primary professional interest was (he's retired now) engineering, and I 'd never thought of him having an "artistic side," per se. So this object, because of how he'd altered it, had the effect of opening up a different side of him, and simultaneously opening up this whole mystery -- the mystery of what your parents were like before you existed, which is a difficult thing to comprehend at age 12. Anyway I took this book with me at some point and never gave it back. From time to time I take it off a shelf in my office and look at it. It still fascinates me.