The Past Life of Cardboard Millionaires. Twelve-year-old me was convinced my baseball card collection was going to make me rich. I still have the album of my most valuable cards from 1994, carefully sleeved, waiting for that big payday. I looked them up recently. Turns out they are worth…very little. Former AoM contributor Jon Finkel’s piece truly captures the baseball-card-collecting experience of my youth: reading the Beckett guides like they were Barron’s, the cafeteria trades, the absolute certainty that Ken Griffey Jr. rookies were basically treasury bonds. It’s a fun read, but there’s a real financial lesson buried in it. Trees don’t grow to the sky. Be wary of bubbles. For an AoM podcast deepcut, check out this 2010 interview I did about the history and future of baseball cards.
The Prestige. Kate and I have always found the world of magic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries intriguing and been especially interested in Houdini, who we wrote about back in the day. So we loved Christopher Nolan’s film about two rival stage magicians in Victorian-era London when it came out in 2006. We recently watched it again with our kids, and they were hooked too. Nolan does a great job capturing the period atmosphere. But the story about the obsession and rivalry between Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale is what makes this movie so dang gripping. Also, Nolan does his usual Nolan thing with the plot — it folds back on itself, resulting in moments of “Oh man! I didn’t see that coming!” Highly recommend watching if you haven’t ever seen it, or haven’t seen it in a long time.
Apple AirTags. I was skeptical about how much I’d actually use Apple’s AirTags, so I held off on buying them for a long time. I finally pulled the trigger a while back, and they’ve turned out to be incredibly handy. I keep one in my wallet and one on each set of our keys. The number of minutes I’ve clawed back from the “Where are my keys?!” rush when I’m running late to pick up the kids has added up. A four-pack runs around $100, but it’s a small price to pay for not tearing apart your couch twice a week.
The Firm by John Grisham. I’m working on a future AoM piece that’s had me revisiting bestselling novels from the ’90s, which gave me an excuse to finally read John Grisham’s 1991 breakout work, The Firm. As a law grad, I found Mitch McDeere — a hungry young associate seduced by the money and prestige of a too-good-to-be-true Memphis firm — pretty easy to relate to. Grisham knows how law firm life actually feels, and he uses that authenticity as the foundation for a gripping, fast-paced thriller that has you going from Memphis to the Cayman Islands to Florida. Good vacation read. You can knock it out in a week. Going to watch the film adaptation starring Tom Cruise and a bunch of other big stars like Gene Hackman, Wilfred Brimley, Ed Harris, and Tulsa’s own Jeanne Tripplehorn.
On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Ex Libris: The Nicomachean Ethics and Sunday Firesides: Intimations of Immortality.
Quote of the Week
Sin has many tools, but a lie is a handle that fits them all.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
