Author: Melissa Bridwell

Some people attend auction houses with no intention of losing. One of them seems to be Thomas Fish, president of Blowoutcards.com. Fish won a record-breaking $360,000 for a Pokémon First Edition Base Set Sealed Booster Box, a 1999 Wizards of the Coast production still in its original shrinkwrap, at Heritage Auctions’ Comics and Comic Art sale, which took place over three days in late November. Just two months prior, in September 2020, at Heritage Auctions, the previous world record was set at $198,000. Fish didn’t simply outperform it. He almost doubled it. This is especially noteworthy because, even before the…

The notion that a laminated card could introduce an undergraduate to one of the most challenging thinkers of the twentieth century—a man who once wrote that there is no right life within a wrong world—is almost comical. However, that is essentially what took place. Theodor Adorno became teachable somewhere between the survey courses of American liberal arts colleges and the lecture halls of British universities. A British professor who has had a quiet, consistent, and genuinely underappreciated impact on humanities departments in the United States is primarily to blame for that change. Adorno was not a simple person. Born in…

There’s something about entering a card show in a mall that eliminates any sense of grandeur. Not a convention center. No parking structures costing forty dollars. All that was present were folding tables, plastic sleeves, and a large number of people who genuinely cared. That’s what makes the Crossroads Mall Card Show feel more like a neighborhood get-together with rare cardboard than a trade show. It’s difficult to ignore the variety of attendees. A teenager looking through binder pages with the attention of a lawyer. Holding a graded slab up to the fluorescent light is a middle-aged collector wearing a…

A teenager who makes more money from trading cards than his parents do from full-time employment is quietly remarkable. Not spectacular or eye-catching. It’s the kind of thing that causes you to pause and consider how the world is changing beneath everyone’s feet. That is precisely what has been taking place in Perth, Western Australia. A local teenager who is still in high school and living at home has established a Pokémon card company that, by most accounts, brings in more money each month than either of his parents. Ambition wasn’t the beginning of it. It began with cards strewn…

There is a certain type of anxiety that permeates every sports card show these days. Collectors squint at corners and surface texture, lean in close over tables, take out loupe magnifiers, and tilt cards under the light at strange angles. To some extent, they have always done this. However, it now has a benefit that wasn’t present a few years ago. Everyone in the hobby seems to know someone who was burned, and the problem of counterfeit goods has gotten worse. That reality is beginning to be reflected in the lawsuits. Counterfeit NFL rookie cards sold through online marketplaces are…

The academic community largely shrugged when David Gauntlett introduced a series of sociology trading cards via his website Theory.org in the year 2000. Some people thought it was adorable. It was referred to as a gimmick by some. Nobody anticipated that Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Anthony Giddens would wind up in students’ jacket pockets and be passed around seminar rooms like rare foil Pokémon cards. But here’s the thing: that’s essentially what took place. Each of the twelve cards in the original set, which was released once a month, featured a social or cultural theorist along with their main…

The concept has an almost rebellious quality. Reduce Foucault, Baudrillard, and Guy Debord—the most intimidating and dense thinkers in cultural and media theory—to a card that fits in your back pocket. Nor is it a simplified version. A distilled one. That was the wager David Gauntlett made in 2001 when he developed Theory Trading Cards via his website theory.org.uk, a tool designed for those attempting to comprehend cultural theory rather than merely get by. The trading cards seemed to mirror what British media and communications scholar Gauntlett had observed in lecture halls and classrooms: students weren’t failing to interact with…

A square of cloth, hardly larger than a postage stamp, sewn to a baseball jersey sleeve has an almost subdued quality. In most situations, it would go unnoticed. However, in the realm of baseball card collecting, that patch has begun to signify something quite different, more akin to a memento, evidence of existence, or tangible documentation of an unrepeatable moment. The idea behind Topps’ MLB Debut Patch cards, which were introduced a few years ago, is fairly simple: a specially prepared patch is embedded in a sleeve of a player’s jersey when he makes his first major league appearance. Following…

When you enter a mid-sized convention center on a Saturday morning in nearly any American city, you’ll notice that things have changed over the past ten years. Early on, the parking lot fills up. Before the main entrance even opens, families pour through glass doors. Inside, stacked booster boxes, binders, and display cases cover the wall-to-wall folding tables. Negotiation is a constant, low hum. Additionally, very few people are using their phones because the action is directly in front of them. It’s a Pokémon card show. Additionally, it is now drawing larger crowds than the nearby minor league baseball game…

The same irritated expression can be seen in almost every American philosophy or political theory classroom: a professor in the middle of a sentence, pointing to the board, attempting to explain why a hospital and a prison might be performing similar tasks. The pupils are not antagonistic. Simply put, they’re lost. That’s what Foucault does to people. In today’s academic world, Michel Foucault is one of the most assigned and least understood thinkers. His theories about power, which hold that it is a diffuse, generative force ingrained in knowledge, institutions, and everyday life rather than just something the powerful use…