Author: Melissa Bridwell

Steven Spiegel didn’t enjoy gambling in general. He was an investor in real estate from Brooklyn. As a child, he got a $50 Shaq rookie card at a local toy store and learned early on that the sports card market had its own way of making sense. They didn’t buy the 2003–04 Upper Deck Exquisite LeBron James Rookie Patch Autograph for $35,000. He and his brother Alan planned to. The bet was well thought out. Card No. 44 out of 99; BGS grade of 9. A jersey patch with many colors. Many people didn’t believe Steven when he called it…

A piece of cardboard became the most valuable sports collectible ever sold at 12:28 in the morning, in the middle of a Dallas auction that had been building up for weeks. A Mint+ 9.5 grade from Sportscard Guaranty Corporation was given to the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card, which sold at Heritage Auctions’ Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction for $12.6 million. A lot of people would have thought that number was crazy even five years ago. Even before the bidding ended, the card had already broken a record. A few weeks ago, the price went over the $6.6 million…

People who talk about education reform often think that for real change to happen, it needs to be backed by venture capital, coded in an app, and launched from somewhere within ten miles of Stanford University. Silicon Valley has bet on that idea for years. A lot of money has been put into dashboards, adaptive learning platforms, and AI tutors. It has worked in some ways. A lot of it hasn’t changed. While investors argue about whether disruption is better than sustainability, something much quieter has been going on in classrooms. Theory trading cards, which are real, tactile, pocket-sized cards…

There’s a certain kind of anger that slowly builds up in a college professor over years or even decades. It doesn’t make itself known. It just builds up—into blank stares during class discussions and office hours where students ask not what something means but how little they need to read. Some faculty at Amherst College noticed this change a long time before anyone wrote a think piece about it. This is because the college has a strong humanities tradition and heavy emphasis on serious reading. A British professor’s card game slowly but surely making its way across American liberal arts…

There’s something about a locked storage locker that makes time stand still. The lock is getting rusty. The number that is written on the door fades. Inside, a collection waits, sometimes for years or even decades, without being seen, touched, or known by anyone who might know what’s there. In Omaha, Nebraska, one of these lockers recently gave up something unexpected: a collection of materials from the Great Depression that most people had forgotten about. The find wasn’t exciting. There were no neon lights, film crew, or dramatic music. A metal door slowly moved up on its hinges, and it…

It’s not very interesting to look at a cardboard box in the garage. It doesn’t happen very often. It gets lost in all the other stuff, between old kitchen appliances and a bag of clothes that were meant to be donated three summers ago. In Tampa, a family almost lost a box like that on a folding table with a handwritten price tag, where strangers were going through their old stuff on a Saturday morning. It wasn’t junk to find inside. Hundreds of Pokémon cards, some of which were still sealed, had been saved up over years. Back then, collecting…

When you don’t stop to think about what it means, a certain kind of stubbornness doesn’t seem heroic. Already, running a small store in Manchester is hard work: you have to work long hours, make small profits, and deal with the usual problems like stock and staffing. There were three armed thefts of the same store, with the same owner and the same shelves of rare Pokémon cards. This makes it harder to explain. It’s not quite defiance. Not really denial. There was something quieter and trickier than both of them. The Manchester store owner at the center of this…

At the beginning of every baseball season, the background noise dies down and a few names start to stand out. It happened April of last year. It took place again this time. This year, that clarity came faster than most people thought it would, thanks to six rookies who didn’t look like rookies at all. For decades, Beckett has been the hobby’s most reliable source of price information. He quickly picked out the group of players to keep an eye on: Chase DeLauter, Munetaka Murakami, Kevin McGonigle, Sal Stewart, Carson Benge, and JJ Wetherholt. Six different people. There are six…

There is a certain type of object that is somewhere between serious and funny. Something that makes you not sure whether to show it off or hide it in a drawer before your coworkers get there. That kind of thing is theory trading cards, which are small, illustrated cards with names like Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, and Michel Foucault on them. They’ve also found their most enthusiastic fans in graduate seminar rooms in the United States, not in the lecture halls of British universities where they were first thought of. The cards were first made by David Gauntlett for his…

When you try to pull off a scam and leave a paper trail with dates and times, you’re being especially stupid. One would think that most con artists know the basics: hide your tracks, tell the truth, and don’t say you got a package two days before it was delivered. Still, people who play Pokémon cards keep meeting people who do just that. A post that went around card-collecting areas of Reddit last year didn’t read much like a complaint and more like a case study. A seller sold a Charizard ex 199/165 Special Illustration Rare from the 151 set.…