Author: Melissa Bridwell

Many childhood beds have a worn-out shoebox that economists ought to take a closer look at. There were rubber-banded baseball card stacks, Pokémon sets arranged according to rarity, and Yu-Gi-Oh decks arranged logically enough to impress any portfolio manager. Children weren’t merely having fun. Not a single adult referred to what they were learning about market dynamics, probability, negotiation, and taxonomy as “educational.” It seems that it took Silicon Valley thirty years and thirty billion dollars to reach the same conclusion. From just $9 billion in 2020, the global gamification market—software and services created to make non-gaming activities feel like…

This was not where Michael Tang saw himself. Not at a market, not behind a card table, not observing an adolescent leaf through laminated pictures of Augustine and John Calvin the way one might leaf through a pack of Premier League stickers. Tang had spent years immersed in a PhD program in theology, the kind of work that most people never read—the kind that exists in faculty meetings and footnotes. Then, somewhere between the dissertation drafts and the silent panic of not knowing what to do next, he made a choice that, depending on who you asked, seemed either inspired…

You can probably recall a specific type of sociology instructor who made Émile Durkheim seem like someone you would genuinely want to talk to. Not an entry from a textbook. It’s not a name to commit to memory prior to a midterm. an individual. Intriguing, flawed, and sometimes strange. Someone whose thoughts were more urgent than archived. It’s worthwhile to consider what that teacher was doing differently in retrospect. Most likely, the solution lies in their perceptions of the theorists as individuals rather than merely as sources. Anyone who has spent time in undergraduate sociology programs has undoubtedly seen theory…

When something that shouldn’t make financial sense suddenly does, you experience a certain kind of surprise. Recently, a Michel Foucault trading card sold for $400 on eBay. It wasn’t a signed jersey wrapped in cardstock, a holographic Pokémon, or a rookie athlete. Take a moment to let that land. A card with the face of a French philosopher best known for his writings on prisons, power, and the nature of knowledge sold for $400 from a buyer who was presumably very enthusiastic and had a very particular bookshelf at home. There is currently a resale market for theory trading cards.…

In most lecture halls, there is a specific point around the twenty-minute mark when something subtly breaks down. Eyes wander. Pens move more slowly. When attentive and inquisitive students arrive, they start working almost automatically and take in very little of what the lecturer is actually saying. It’s not indolence. As it happens, biology might be the only explanation. For years, neuroscience has been pushing educators toward this difficult reality. The brain does not function particularly well when it is required to passively take in information at the pace of another person. Students rating their own difficulty during video lectures…

In most sociology classes, there comes a time around week four or five when you can sense the classroom becoming uncomfortably quiet. The hollow kind, in which students are copying words from a slide without actually hearing them, is not the contemplative quiet of intense concentration. Durkheim. Anomie. stratification of society. The words appear on the page and remain there, lifeless and flat, unrelated to anything a twenty-year-old has truly gone through. It’s difficult to ignore how long this has been taken for granted by educators. Because of this, the increasing use of theory trading cards in sociology classes is…

A trading card has a subtly radical quality. You can carry it in your pocket. It can be lost, traded, or kept flat inside a book for thirty years before it reappears with a hint of the past. It appears that the National Park Service is aware of this. The NPS has taken a completely different approach, involving cardstock, rangers, and a trip to Fort Moultrie, while the larger federal government has been busy organizing UFC fights on the White House lawn and IndyCar races around the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate America’s 250th birthday. The 250th Anniversary Trading Cards are…

The way it started wasn’t very dramatic. Someone assembled a collection of theory summaries and made them available as a PDF somewhere. Most accounts point to a small university office, the kind with mismatched chairs and a whiteboard still marked from a previous semester. There is no publisher involved. No ISBN. No launch party. The way thousands of academic resources are disseminated annually and quickly forgotten—just a document, discreetly uploaded and shared. However, this one was not overlooked. It was printed out and slid across seminar tables by professors in various nations within a few semesters. Before tests, at midnight,…

Last Saturday, Roger Goodell signed an Eagles card on stage in Pittsburgh, writing “Fly Eagles Fly” underneath his name. Michael Rubin, the CEO of Fanatics, then raised it and asked the audience if anyone wanted it. The crowd erupted, which was, by most accounts, genuinely unexpected. That moment likely felt almost like relief to Goodell, who has spent years walking onto NFL Draft stages to a wall of jeers. Perhaps even vindication. It’s difficult to ignore what was going on there. The card was more than a prop. It was an indication. Earlier this year, the NFL formally terminated its…

Around page three of Simulacra and Simulation, a certain kind of frustration begins to set in. The sentence has been read twice by you. You’ve read it three times. Something about Baudrillard’s meaning keeps slipping away, like trying to grasp water, even though the words are in English or sufficiently similar. Jean Baudrillard may have left more graduate students staring blankly at a wall than any other thinker in the postmodern canon. However, once the concepts land, they seem nearly obvious. Reality is being replaced by signs. The real is buried by the hyperreal. A world in which “reality television”…