Author: Melissa Bridwell

Something incredibly strange about the thought of one of hockey’s holiest items almost going missing into a stranger’s trunk for two dollars. Back in the depths of the Great Depression, a woman whose name no one seems to have thought to write down sold the Howe family a bag full of different things. That plain bag—the kind you wouldn’t think twice about taking to the curb—had Gordie Howe’s first hockey stick inside. This kind of story sounds too good to be true. But the Great Depression made people careless about things they would have been more careful with otherwise. There…

In the best way possible, it’s almost funny. A small test has been going on in American college classrooms, somewhere between a deck of Pokémon cards and a worn-out copy of C. Wright Mills. Professors are giving out trading cards—real, physical cards—with short summaries of decades of critical thought by living and dead sociologists and theorists. It looks like the students are paying attention. It wasn’t a movement at first. At first, it was just a stopgap. Sociology has always had a problem with being hard to get into. The field asks really interesting questions, like why do some people…

A small but important fact is hidden in the history of American sociology. In 1956, the American Sociological Review published a peer-reviewed study that looked into whether card games showed signs of “moral debilitation” in the way American society was set up. After all that research, the main conclusion was that people like to play cards with their friends and family. The study proved what any grandmother at the kitchen table already knew. Now, that moment seems to teach us something. For no reason, this is not a cheap shot at academia. It’s a look into a real issue: the…

A man has spent most of the last twenty years collecting American football cards in a corner of Edinburgh that tourists never really find. It is somewhere between the nice Georgian terraces and the quieter residential streets. Not football the way people in Edinburgh think of it. Not the sport that everyone in Scotland plays on Saturday afternoons, not the game that is played in the rain at Easter Road or Tynecastle. The different kind. The one with the helmets, shoulder pads, and playbooks that are hard to understand. His neighbors knew about it for years. Some of them still…

When it comes to time, an attic is different from the rest of a house. Up there, dust settles in different ways. Light gets through wrong. What looks like a box of old junk can sometimes be something that stops auction house veterans in their tracks. This doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. It was pretty much like that when Karl Kissner went into the attic of his late grandfather in rural Ohio and pulled out a cardboard box tied with a neat bundle of baseball cards from 100 years ago. Almost 700 of them. Not touched since…

One of the binders is in a room with climate control in the suburbs of Ohio. It has Pokémon cards inside that are all sorted by set year and put in rigid toploaders. Together, they are worth more than a year’s college tuition. The owner has home insurance. He is a software engineer in his mid-30s who started collecting as a child and never stopped. He probably doesn’t have enough insurance to cover what’s inside that binder, though. This is a hole that the insurance business has only recently started to pay attention to. For a long time, people thought…

A Pokémon card is in a glass case in the back of an American pawn shop right now. There’s nothing strange about that. However, the card may have been in a hobby store display case three weeks ago, locked and priced at $1,400, before someone broke through it at 2 a.m. and left with a bag full of items. It now has a price tag written by hand, and no one is questioning it. That’s the part of the collectible card boom that doesn’t get talked about at conventions. The trading card market has grown into something that most people…

Certain types of loss don’t make themselves known very loudly. There was no harm. Not a single landmark fell. Somewhere in Auckland’s industrial belt, a warehouse was burning all night while the city slept. Inside it, a collection of trading cards, letters, and printed matter from before the war that had made it through rationing, blackouts, and two world wars had just stopped existing. The fire in Auckland that destroyed a rare collection of pre-war cards didn’t make news around the world. Of all the sad parts, that might be it. People who knew about the collection, like collectors and…

If you go to a coffee shop that college students like, you might notice something strange on the tables: small, beautifully illustrated cards spread out next to laptops and oat milk lattes that are only half full. Not Pokémon. Not tarot. You can collect theory trading cards in the form of physical or digital items. These cards simplify difficult philosophical, psychological, and social ideas into something you can hold, trade, and talk about with another person. It sounds very specific. No longer is it. In the past few years, the trend has slowly spread to college bookstore shelves, social networks,…

In the minutes before something big happens, there’s a certain kind of quiet that settles over a casino floor. The machines hum. A long way away, coins are clinking together. People move slowly, almost asleep, putting bills into slots with the careless speed of someone checking their phone. No one is expecting anything. It works like that most of the time. Because of this, what happened at the Westgate Las Vegas is so hard to understand. The name of the visitor from Atlanta has not been made public, which is understandable. They recently sat down at an IGT Megabucks machine…