TOYS TOYS TOYS

December 20, 2019

Listen: Super Rich Kids by Nilüfer Yanya

Super Rich Kids was on fire already under Frank Ocean, and this week it’s coming back at us fresh as a cover by Nilüfer Yanya. Yanya achieves the impossible in rendering the track even more dreamy and distorted than before— and the real bonus is that it comes in her musky, shape-shifting voice. The best case for a re-gift. Listen here.

NEW TOY STORE YAYYYYY

Just in time for Christmas and Hanukkah, I wrote a story about a toy store for the New York Times. The rub: a year ago, the CMO of Buzzfeed started Camp, a totally immaculate “family experience store” where kids can play for free, and hopefully their parents also buy something. (That something might also be a ticket to a craft activity, or even a gift for a fellow adult— Camp has a Pixar-level kid-grownup appeal.) Anyway, they’ve expanded to five stores within a year of opening thanks to a nice $10.5 million from venture capitalists. But after this year of unicorn bubbles, here’s the question on everyone’s mind: WILL. IT. SCALE.

Sometimes toys are sad

Meanwhile, Japan has no children, so in their place, people are keeping dolls. No, really— the Japan’s birth rate is problematically low, and in the rural village of Nagoro, there are no kids at all. So, in a place where the youngest resident is 38, and a population of 300 has shrunk to a couple dozen, one woman has crafted hundreds of dolls to populate the area, doing what people used to do there: celebrating field day at school, shaking down chestnut trees, riding in wagons. It’s three parts sad to two parts cheerful and leads inevitably to a hope that the doll lady lives a really, really long time.

Oh wait, your child is your toy

You remember hot wheels, right? Well, kids still love to “drive,” and carmakers are seizing the opportunity to rope ’em in early. Mercedes, Jaguar and other luxury carmakers now make models for kiddos, ranging in price from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 for the Jag. Fans are are raving about how luxury cars, a genderless pursuit, can inspire kids of ANY identity to learn engineering some day, which, if true, sounds like a great perk of being born wealthy. How’s it look from up there, kids?

Easy bake oven for me, thanks.

Margot

 

PS This is your last chance to enter to win the trip to Zambia and Botswana. Do it— it’s a good one!

PPS This is also our last newsletter til the new year. Enjoy your time off, buds, and see you in 2020 ✨