This essay is forthcoming in Intermezzo, an online journal that specializes in essays too long for print journals and too short for a book, my Goldilocks zone as it happens. It begins with a dueling-banjo conversation between Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1968) and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2014), two tomes that bookended my academic career, and concludes with a critique of “the book” as a medium that has been transformed, invisibly, into a hyperobject both in Western culture and, more specifically and deleteriously, in the contemporary academy.