I'm over on Substack with a free monthly newsletter CHEERFUL TEARFUL: A MEMOIR IN TOYS.

My great, great grandmothers couldn’t have written a memoir in toys. There were few play-pretties, childhood wasn’t yet an institution, and hard plastic hadn’t been invented. But I, coming along at the tail end of the baby boom in an era of mass production, can write of toys in order to tell of other things: long goodbyes, sibling relationships, birth order, parental best efforts, choices, disappointments, things lost or regretted, the unreliability of memory, and what we really want as opposed to what we are supposed to want. Subscribe and join the discussions! https://hnewton.substack.com/p/cheerful-tearful?r=19q7al