Author: Melissa Bridwell

When trust breaks down slowly over time in ways that no one noticed, there is a certain kind of silence that falls over a religious institution. That silence is being felt right now at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Pittsburgh. It began in a Beaver County Walmart’s baseball card aisle, of all places. Before being arrested, The Very Rev. Aidan Smith was the dean of one of Pittsburgh’s most important Episcopal cathedrals. He was arrested in late February after Walmart security noticed that he had a history of stealing. He wasn’t careless about it. Court records show that Smith went…

While you sleep at night, you can watch a card authentication cycle go by. It’s almost relaxing. The machine takes out the card, reads the chip, checks the certificate, asks for the PIN, and then waits. In less than four seconds, everything takes place. Then the next one starts all over again. The engineers who are watching the line hardly ever look up. They’ve seen it a million times. Still, the line keeps getting longer. This is how things really are in authentication labs that check smart cards—places that most people don’t think about until something goes wrong. Several of…

Right now, people in the Sacramento area are doing something on the weekends that looks like a game to the outside world. A table. A stack of sealed boxes. You might pay as much attention to a father and his son pulling cards from foil wrappers as you would to reading a financial report. That’s a pretty good way to describe some of these families. Anthony Peluso had no plans to run a Pokémon card shop. He managed a sales team for years at a company that sold alcohol before he was fired last October. In Orangevale, California, the man…

The picture is quietly striking: a steel capsule buried under a university courtyard and sealed. Inside the capsule is not just news stories or pictures, but also a pack of trading cards. Not 1950s baseball cards. Not things for a child’s room. Academic theory trading cards are used in college to teach ideas, start debates, and encourage focused, tactile thinking that you can’t get from scrolling through your phone. Three universities in the United States have now agreed to put trading cards for theories in time capsules that will be opened many years from now. It might sound like a…

The NFL Draft has gone from a meeting in a hotel room behind closed doors to the Fountains of Bellagio in one of the more quiet changes in American sports history. It was quiet until Las Vegas got a hold of it. It doesn’t happen at all in one version of this story. When ESPN asked Pete Rozelle, who was commissioner at the time, about showing the draft on TV in 1980, he reportedly said only one word: “Why?” He didn’t understand why anyone would want to watch some people on the team read names off a list. He agreed…

There is a stack of Pokémon cards waiting to be looked at somewhere, and it might be yours. Not lost or stolen. Getting ready. After about 14 million other people. That’s what PSA, the biggest card grading company in the collectibles world, had to deal with in the middle of 2026. The company graded 2.5 million cards in June alone, which is a record by any measure. Even so, it had to close down its four most popular submission levels because the backlog kept growing too fast for the output to keep up. Take a moment to think about what…

There’s something off about walking down the aisle of Father’s Day cards. Every year, the same jokes about drunk people, bad driving, and being useless in general pile up on the racks. You take one, smirk a little, and put it back. You might laugh. If you’re being honest, you might have had a vague feeling that you could have done better. One story this Father’s Day was able to put that small, nagging feeling into words. It wasn’t an essay or a campaign speech; it was just a bunch of cards saved over decades by a dad who never…

When PSA said in May that it would be investing $200 million, collectors all over the world knew that something big was about to happen. What no one quite saw coming was the speed with which it happened: a rush of submissions so big that it broke the line. Just a few weeks after the May 14 announcement, PSA’s backlog had grown to about 10 million cards. Just seeing that number would have made people wonder. But on June 9, the company quietly changed that number to almost 14 million. The jump wasn’t sneaky. It was clear that the initial…

There is a certain kind of shock that comes from not the crime itself but from the person who did it. People were shocked when the Very Rev. Aidan Smith, who was dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Pittsburgh, was arrested outside of a Walmart in Economy Borough on February 27. It wasn’t just the accident that shocked them. It was the picture. An Episcopal priest, 42 years old, walked out of a big-box store with 27 packs of baseball cards hidden under his clothes and in a cardboard box. Walmart security had already seen him and warned them.…

First, it’s important to note that this probably doesn’t make any sense. A playing card with a cartoon yellow mouse on it that was about the size of a business card just sold for $16,492,000. Goldin is one of the most well-known auction houses in the United States for collecting things. After 41 days of bidding, the winning bid came in. As soon as the hammer hit the ground, confetti all over the place, and a Guinness World Records official made it official. This is the Pikachu Illustrator card, which most people who aren’t card collectors have never heard of.…