Author: Melissa Bridwell

Anyone who has ever had to learn sociology for an exam experiences a certain dread, which usually manifests about the third hour of staring at a notebook filled with identical-looking phrases from deceased Germans. Marx made a statement regarding labor. Weber shared his thoughts about bureaucracy. Regarding social truths, Durkheim had something to say. By the time you’ve read it five times, the names start to blur and you’ve learned almost nothing. They all stated it in slightly different variations of the same austere academic style. Because they replicate the problem in smaller form—a word on one side and a…

Pre-boarding procedures at Gate B14 in Dallas/Fort Worth’s Terminal B, which most travelers consider to be pointless, have recently taken on a new twist. Passengers waiting to board American Airlines flights have been observed asking gate attendants a somewhat different inquiry than usual: whether the pilots have any cards left. This query has nothing to do with the availability of overhead bins or the status of upgrades. First-come, first-served collectible aircraft trading cards will be given out by flight crew as part of the airline’s 100th anniversary celebration. There will be seven million of them. Nevertheless, there seems to be…

A child in America opened a pack of Donruss cards in 1966, took out a Spider-Man, gave it a quick glance, and most likely tucked it into a pocket, a shoebox, or a bicycle spoke. In 1966, you used cards like those. They weren’t sleeved by you. They were not sent for grading by you. You traded them, used them, distorted them, and eventually lost them to the specific entropy that consumes most childhood memories. There are currently fewer than 400 PSA-graded copies of that Spider-Man card because that occurred at scale, among millions of packs sold with bubble gum…

The Laugh Factory’s sign is illuminated on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, a section of the street that has seen enough reinventions in the entertainment business to be rather unshakeable. Most nights, someone is performing for an audience that came particularly to laugh—not to watch content or stream a special, but to be in the room as someone attempts to be funny in real time, which is a distinct and far more vulnerable thing. Jamie Masada, the club’s founder, has been in charge since 1979. Despite his many comedic instincts, his most recent one has caused a reaction for which the…

You can sense the unique weight of items that have been deemed worthy of preservation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., somewhere between the Wright Brothers Flyer hung from the ceiling of the Air and Space Museum and the Hope Diamond sitting in its glass case of the Natural History Museum. Throughout its nineteen museums and extensive research collections, the Smithsonian has always been in the business of determining what is important enough to preserve—what is labeled, cataloged, and made public. By that standard, the choice to include a set of trading cards in its Education Collection is modest…

There is most likely an untouched 1999 First Edition Pokémon booster box in a storage facility located in a suburban area of New Jersey, sealed within a climate-controlled unit. When it was brand-new, it cost about $90. These days, the price could range from $400,000 to many times that, depending on the seal’s condition, the printing run, and the auction firm handling the sale. The owner may or may not be aware of this. When they put that box in storage 25 years ago, they most likely had no idea that it would eventually beat all index funds, the majority…

Watching GameStop, a company for which most people had already written a quiet eulogy, try to swallow eBay whole is ironic in a certain way. Avoid nibbling on it. Don’t collaborate with it. Purchase it for about $55.5 billion at a 20% premium, even though its current value is less than 25% of that amount. It’s the kind of move that causes you to put down your coffee and take two looks at the headline. According to reports, Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop and the man who turned Chewy into a massive pet supply company before most people considered…

A small deck of laminated cards, each printed with a theorist’s name, a school of thought, and a two-sentence synopsis of concepts that took some scholars entire careers to develop, may be seen sitting next to a student’s casebook and highlighters in some American law school classrooms these days. feminist legal theory. critical theory of race. realism in law. Economics and law. It was all purposefully shrunk to the size of a baseball card. The theory trading card format, which was developed over the past few years by a few progressive legal educators and is currently making its way into…

On most afternoons, students will spread small illustrated cards across their notebooks at a table in Columbia University’s Butler Library, much like someone might sort a deck before a poker game. These aren’t poker cards, though. Each one has a simplified framework on the back and the face of a theorist on the front, such as Derrida, Spivak, Bell Hooks, or Foucault. A syllabus is being annotated by someone nearby. Another person is discreetly attempting to exchange a first-edition Judith Butler card for a duplicate Althusser. It sounds almost ridiculous. However, as you watch it develop, you get the impression…

Before her Tuesday night class, Carmen, a sociology instructor at a Rio Grande Valley community college, laid out forty laminated cards on a folding table. Each card featured a face, such as Durkheim, Goffman, or Bell Hooks, along with a few facts on the reverse. Before entering that room, the majority of her students worked full shifts. The assigned textbook had not been purchased by any of them. Some had never owned one before. However, they took the cards, flipped them over, and began conversing. All across the nation, underfunded universities and community learning centers are silently reenacting that scene…