In 2006, Fortune magazine estimated that 40 million Americans worked in cubicles. How did the office cubicle, "reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its creator" (as Fortune put it), conquer our workplace? And were things so much better before? What forces have shaped the evolution of offices? Nikil Saval pondered all these questions when he was trapped in a cubicle, and finding no comprehensive history, wrote one himself.