EVAN KINDLEY DISCUSSES HIS NEW BOOK QUESTIONNAIRE WITH ROSTEN WOO

Questionnaire (Bloomsbury)

Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of “the form as form,” from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By asking questions about the questions we ask ourselves, Kindley uncovers surprising connections between literature and science, psychology and business, and journalism and surveillance.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things, published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Praise for Questionnaire

"A marvelous book that gathers an unexpected array of materials under the heading of the questionnaire: from IQ tests to the early days of marriage counseling, from data-mining Facebook quizzes to Scientology's rigged personality tests. Playful, smart and rich with dizzying connections, Evan Kindley's Questionnaire is no less than a secret history of how we became a nation of oversharers." - Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific; Contributor for The New Yorker;  Associate Professor of English, at Vassar College

Evan Kindley is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a visiting instructor at Claremont McKenna College. His writing has appeared in the New Republic, Bookforum, n+1, the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Rosten Woo is an artist, designer, writer, and educator living in Los Angeles. He makes things that help people understand complex systems, re-orient themselves to places, and participate in group decision-making.