Author: Melissa Bridwell

On the first day of school, there is a certain kind of silence that fills the room. Students are taking a look around the room and figuring out how much sleep and work the semester will cost them. And then Professor Dana Ellroy walks in. Before she even says hello, she puts a card on each desk. It’s not a syllabus. A card for theory. Each card carries a name — Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Patricia Hill Collins, W.E.B. Du Bois — along with a core idea, two or three lines of context, and a question printed at the bottom.…

When someone puts Foucault on the reading list for a seminar, there is a certain kind of silence that falls over the room. The students nod. They write down the title. Then, sometime between leaving the library and getting home, the goal quietly fades away. It takes place every semester at universities all over the world, and most teachers are okay with it. So, when David Gauntlett, a media scholar at the University of Westminster, came up with the idea for what he called “Theory Trading Cards” about 20 years ago, it almost seemed too silly to be taken seriously.…

Every card collector has been through a certain point. All for a chance at a single box of Topps Tier One. You’ve set an alarm, cleared your schedule, opened three browser tabs, and maybe even texted a friend to do the same. And then the time comes for the release. It seems like all of a sudden, the page says “sold out.” It sounds crazy. A box of baseball cards that is gone before the coffee is even ready. However, anyone who has played for more than one season will tell you that this isn’t a lie—it’s Tuesday. What makes…

Every market has a point where the rules start to change slowly but surely. They don’t change all at once or in a big way, but they change in ways that make some people in the room sit up and take notice. The Pokémon Trading Card Game may have just reached that point. It happened last month at Nintendo’s 86th Annual General Shareholders Meeting in Tokyo, not at some trade show. President of Nintendo Shuntaro Furukawa took questions about card shortages and scalping, issues that have been bothering collectors and parents for a long time. I didn’t hear a thunderclap…

At card shows, there is a certain type of collector who stands quietly in the back and flips through binders with the calm focus of someone who has done this a thousand times. People in Melbourne are more likely to be holding a piece of early 20th-century American baseball history than a footy card or a cricket stub. On paper, it sounds like an odd niche. American sports cards that are older than most of their grandparents are owned by an Australian collector. Still, there is real interest that is growing, and for those willing to put in a lot…

A certain type of person quietly builds something over the course of their career. It might not be money, but it could be knowledge, patience, or the ability to explain difficult concepts in simple terms. Such is the way teachers are. Even though Heather had been a teacher for thirty years, most people thought she would garden, travel, and maybe watch her grandchildren during the week. No one thought she’d spend her mornings taking pictures of holographic trading cards and her evenings online arguing about PSA scores. But that’s pretty much what happened. Like most of these things, it began…

A small thing happens in a stadium that most people don’t notice. There is a new player on the field for the first time. Maybe the crowd moves, the cameras pan, and then the game goes on. But there is an MLB official very close by watching that jersey sleeve very carefully. What comes off that arm after the last out is now worth more than most people’s homes. That is not an exaggeration. A patch autographed by Paul Skenes was sold on Fanatics Collect for $1.11 million in March 2025. Dick’s Sporting Goods bought it from the secondary market…

You might find something in a London or Chicago middle-sized card store right now that wasn’t there two years ago: stacks of Japanese Pokémon packs lying out in the open on shelves, cheap and easy to grab. There is no lottery. There was no sellout in minutes. Only cards. For collectors who remember how crazy things were in 2020 and 2021, this small change seems big. The story behind what’s happening is pretty simple, but it takes place over two continents and over several years of excessive speculation. The Japanese Pokémon card market, which grew a lot during the pandemic,…

When you hold a Pokémon card that you paid a lot of money for and wonder if it’s real, it’s a little unsettling. Not because the card seems sketchy. Since it doesn’t. That is the exact issue. Professional Sports Authenticators (PSA), the company that grades trading cards for collectors all over the world, said in a 2025 report that Pokémon TCG cards have become the most popular target for trading card fraud in the world. It’s not just the largest. Through a large margin. Ryan Hoge, president of PSA, said it best: Pokémon “dwarfs everything else.” In 2025, 56.3% of…

Most people who watch the NFL Draft feel like time slows down a bit between when a prospect’s name is called and when they take a picture with Roger Goodell shaking hands. This year, that same moment went by faster than anyone thought it would for collectors. As the 2026 NFL Draft began, Topps did something that not even its own team could fully explain after the fact. As each prospect walked out on stage, a Topps photographer took a picture of them. The picture was then sent directly to an on-site printer, and within 60 to 90 seconds, the…