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Like many Americans, I have been home with my children 24/7 for nearly six weeks. The experience has become an independent study for my job as a curator responsible for toys and dolls. I see how my kids interact with their toys and dolls and reflect on what these playthings teach my children. Adding to the mix, my mom has also started to drop off boxes of my childhood playthings, including a bin of Barbie dolls.
Barbie has generated criticism since […]

Continue Reading about Life in Plastic: It’s Not Just Barbie Published on:
May 15, 2020

When I left home for graduate school and my first apartment, I could barely boil water. But I rapidly recognized that I couldn’t afford to go out to eat very often and I didn’t want to subsist on products from the supermarket’s freezer case. My solution? Learn to cook! Living alone let me experiment and hone my kitchen skills without anyone else around to say, “I thought we were going to eat before 8 p.m.” or “Did you really mean […]

Continue Reading about Cooking for Fun Published on:
May 13, 2020

Ralph Baer is perhaps best known as the father of home video games. He patented the idea for playing a video game on a television and then successfully developed the first home video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey, that came out in 1972. And yet Baer’s work on video games was only one small part of a lifetime of inventing. He had worked for decades in the defense industry, ultimately heading a major engineering division of Sanders, a large military […]

Continue Reading about Ralph Baer—Toy Inventor Published on:
May 7, 2020

Mary Valentine
The Strong Museum Trustee
 
I’ve had a love of music since I was a kid—singing, dancing, listening, playing while listening. Playing while listening? Absolutely. I’m talking about musical chairs. I first played this game at my August birthday party when I was about eight or nine years old. Since I was born in the summer, the parties were held in our backyard, with my dad cooking up hot dogs and hamburgers on a round grill from Sears, Roebuck & Co, […]

Continue Reading about Musical Chairs Published on:
May 5, 2020

Not long ago—1977, to be exact—in our very own galaxy, moviegoers witnessed the birth of a legend. Since its inception, the Star Wars franchise has generated billions of dollars in film, television, and merchandise, and is one of the most iconic titles in entertainment history. But while its popularity is undisputed today, that was not always the case. In fact, it was quite the opposite, which led to what could have easily become one of the biggest faux pas in […]

Continue Reading about Star Wars Day: The Action Figures that Almost Weren’t Published on:
April 30, 2020

In 2018, The Strong embarked on a project to digitize floppy disks using a device called the Kryoflux to capture the data stored on 3.5- and 5.25-inch floppy disks. Reading a floppy disk in the 21st century was the first step necessary to preserve hundreds of floppy disks in The Strong’s archival collections. In some cases, the Kryoflux was a useful tool to capture old games and development materials but, with more than 1,500 floppy disk images in […]

Continue Reading about Digging for GEM icons in an Atari ST Floppy Disk Published on:
April 28, 2020

While recent world events may be causing many of us to feel uncertain—or even stuck—as most businesses, restaurants, and entertainment venues remain closed indefinitely, the circumstances seem to be fueling something much bigger: a global tidal wave of creativity.
Our day to day lives can often be so busy that we unwittingly fall into a routine many of us rarely stray from. However, for millions of folks any sense of routine has been upended in recent weeks due to the global […]

Continue Reading about Creativity in the Time of Quarantine Published on:
April 23, 2020

It feels so long ago when I last wrote about domestic hobbies as play. It was indeed a different world—if we told our past selves what our lives look like now, we wouldn’t believe ourselves.
But what was true then is still true today: the calm attained when lost in the flow of an activity like sewing or knitting is a powerful and addictive, and a welcome respite from daily worries. The finished products of our craft are a testimony to […]

Continue Reading about Domestic Hobbies: Flattening the Curve from Home Published on:
April 20, 2020

In 2018, the toy industry saw a significant increase in toys related to potty humor. Some critics speculated that this was based on the popularity of the smiling poop emoji on the iPhone, while others associated the trend with the new generation of parents raised on South Park’s Mr. Hankey, The Simpsons, and Family Guy. Lawrence Cohen, Ph.D., author of Playful Parenting, noted that the sensory experience of using the bathroom combined with the “hush-hush privacy and secrecy” creates the […]

Continue Reading about Toy Fair 2020: Things That Make You Go Eww Published on:
April 16, 2020