Author: Melissa Bridwell

Every teacher secretly wants that one moment when students stop looking at the clock and start arguing about ideas. Something to do with a board game, a die, and the ghost of Marshall McLuhan seems to be causing that moment to happen more often lately. The MediuM card and board game is based on McLuhan’s Tetrad, which is also called the Laws of Media. Marshall McLuhan, a famous Canadian philosopher, came up with this framework and later formalized it with his son Eric McLuhan in their 1988 book Laws of Media: The New Science. The four laws ask what a…

One type of athlete quits the game and goes on with their life in a way that no one really knows about. Josh Donaldson, the former third baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays who carried the team’s World Series hopes on his back, looked like he might be one of those. Retired in early 2024 and not seen much since. Then he walked into a podcast locker room and casually said that he owned trading cards worth about $35 million. John Elway, who was sitting next to him, choked on his drink. We can pretty much sum it up in…

It began with a single $20 booster pack, the kind you choose without giving it much thought as you walk up to the register. That impulse buy didn’t just start a hobby for one Toronto teen. For most adults, it’s still hard to fully understand how cardboard, nostalgia, and market logic can all come together in the same world. The beginning of the story is not unique. There are a lot of kids who have opened Pokémon boxes in the hopes of finding a rare hidden Charizard. What made a difference in this case were the spreadsheets, the research, the…

A certain moment tells us a lot about where this business has come to. A worker at a hobby store on North Island takes a Mind Stone card out of a pack. It is one of only 150 ever made, and within hours, the store’s phone starts ringing with questions from famous American athletes. The card is finally sold for about the same amount as a small down payment on a house, and two employees personally bring it to America the following week. That’s not a startup dream. In fact, that did happen at Hobby Lords. The 34-year-old managing director…

There is a certain kind of tension in academic settings when something is both useful and fun. Professors start to feel uneasy. It’s not on the syllabus. Still, students keep buying it, passing it around, and remembering things from it. About the same thing happened with a set of sociology study cards: between being designed and being sold, they made an interesting choice: they added star signs and birthdays to the list of important works and theoretical frameworks. Each card has information about an important sociologist, like when they were born, what they are known for, and their astrological sign.…

There’s a certain kind of quiet that settles over a room when something truly old changes hands for an amount of money that doesn’t quite feel real. That sums up what the sports collecting community has been dealing with ever since the “Lucky 7” story entered the public eye and continued to get stranger. Somewhere in the rural South, seven identical, over a century-old Ty Cobb baseball cards were discovered facedown in a torn paper bag on the floor of a dilapidated home. A family was sorting through the belongings of their late great-grandparents. Beneath postcards and other papers, beneath…

There is a particular kind of irony in the fact that bell hooks — a woman who spent decades writing about bringing ideas from the margin to the center — spent much of her intellectual life tucked into the margins of academic papers. Literally. A citation. A footnote. A name dropped in the third paragraph of a thesis no one outside a seminar room would read. And then someone put her on a trading card. It sounds trivial. It sounds like a gimmick, the kind of thing you might find next to tote bags and refrigerator magnets with quotes about…

Right now, a graduate student’s desk in a sociology department has a stack of trading cards. Each one has a face on it — Bourdieu, Foucault, maybe Weber if someone was feeling ambitious — and a few cryptic numbers that suggest strengths, weaknesses, something. Nobody quite knows the rules. These were purchased by someone while they were a graduate student, and now the entire department is laughing at each other’s theories as if they were debating whether or not a defensive midfielder should be in the starting lineup. It sounds like a joke. It is, in a sense. But the…

Mark Li had no idea that a card would be sprayed with pepper. He was merely attempting to sell two pieces of cardstock through Facebook Marketplace outside a Burnaby, British Columbia, home. Of course, the cardstock was worth about $20,000. The meeting appeared to be standard. After confirming the authenticity of the cards, one of the buyers turned to his partner and said, “Get him.” Li took hold of one of them, held on for a moment, and then lost sight. He stood there, blinded, as the suspects vanished with his cards. What came next was more than a police…

The first thing you notice when you enter the Atlantic City Convention Center during the week of the National Sports Collectors Convention is the sound. This is not the typical noise from the casino floor across the street. It’s the steady, low hum of thousands of cardboard-related conversations. Before the doors open, dealers unroll display cases. Collectors with printed want lists in their hands. Thirty people were in line before ten in the morning as a former All-Star signed autographs at a folding table. The National Sports Collectors Convention, or simply “The National,” was founded in 1980 in a hotel…