Author: Melissa Bridwell

There’s something memorable about a card show that takes place in a stadium tunnel. There are concrete walls, a low ceiling, and an odd mix of fluorescent lights and display cases for memorabilia. It shouldn’t work as a setting, but it does. Someone had a similar event in a professional stadium last year, and word quickly spread. A lot of collectors came to trade, look, and mostly just be with other people who knew why a 1952 Topps Mantle made someone cry. The whole country didn’t hear about that event. But the pictures did. In just a day or two,…

Most students first learn about David Gauntlett’s ideas through a rough PDF copy of Media, Gender, and Identity that was passed around a seminar group. The person who borrowed the book from the library the week before had marked it up and underlined a lot of important parts. The book is helpful, and it might be one of the easier academic books on media theory to read. However, it’s becoming an old document that talks about a world that doesn’t really exist anymore. That’s what Gauntlett himself said. Still, there is an easy-to-cross bridge between that second edition from 2008…

Walk around the floor of a big card show like Collect-A-Con in Miami and you’ll see things that would have seemed crazy twenty years ago. There were grown adults, many of them smart and financially savvy, studying Pokémon cards with the kind of focused intensity that you usually only see at jewelry auctions. The prices on some of those cards are written in fives. There’s also a good chance that at least one person in that crowd isn’t there to collect. The collectible card market has gone from being a niche hobby for kids to a serious investment space. Along…

If you look closely, a trading card of Theodor Adorno is kind of funny. It’s glossy, collectible, and looks like it should have a batting average or a power ranking. For someone whose career has been spent breaking down the workings of mass culture, this format seems almost on purpose wrong. Still, it works in some way. It works even better than that. The card has been passed around, and the quote on the back is the kind of thing that means different things to different people at different points in their lives. The quote is from a talk Adorno…

Topps Inception is different from other cards in the hobby in a way that makes it feel interesting. It hits you in a different way because of its weight and the anticipation of what’s inside. And that feeling has only grown stronger in 2025. People who have been collecting for a long time remember when Inception first came out as a football product in 2011. It was a pretty new product with a unique look. No one really thought it would become one of the best baseball premium releases in the end. But here we are. Collectors are genuinely excited…

As soon as you walk into the room of a serious collector, something is clear. The cards are perfect in every way. Most of the time, the storage is a disaster waiting to happen. In a shoebox, penny sleeves are half open. Slabs of different grades moving around on a shelf. There are too many cards in this binder, and you can hear them bending when the pages turn. This happens more often than most collectors would like to admit, and the damage it does is slow, builds up over time, and can’t be fixed. For a while now, the…

There is a certain kind of quiet that comes over a house when someone dies. The mug of coffee that stays on the hook. If you fold your jacket over the chair, no one will move. In the end, that quiet led one mother in Chicago to the basement, where she found something that her late husband probably never thought would be so important to anyone, let alone her. She had no plans to find treasure. She was clearing out her space, which is what widows do when they need a practical place to go because of the weight of…

When something that’s been waiting a long time finally comes, there’s a certain kind of quiet that falls over a hobby. Maybe not really excitement, but more like holding your breath. The trading card world has been pretty much there ever since Fanatics announced that 2026 Topps Flagship Football would be the first fully licensed NFL release in almost ten years. For collectors who remember what it was like to open a pack of Topps Football and find something really cool, this isn’t just the launch of a new product. It feels more like coming home. Fanatics bought Topps in…

There’s a certain kind of chaos in baseball card collecting when something sells out very quickly. Not so slowly that it falls further down the list fast. Gone before you could refresh the page. The 2025 Topps Dynamic Duals set came out on Topps.com on May 30th and pretty much did that. Collectors opened their eyes and saw that the item was gone. Take a moment to think about that, because not every Topps release gets that much attention. There are some things that stay with you. Some boxes collectors think about for a long time, then decide to pick…

A certain type of investor learns not to have to explain themselves at dinner parties. Around 2018, Marcus Heller, a hedge fund manager who works out of a small suite in DUMBO, Brooklyn, with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the Manhattan Bridge, became that type of investor. It was that year that he quietly started putting some of his extra money into Pokémon cards. No, not as a hobby. To make a point. It was about three years before anyone noticed the money coming back. Heller ran concentrated equity strategies for almost twenty years. These were based on companies…