I’ve written about American Girl before, such as this post. For those unacquainted with American Girl, it started off as a doll-based means for girls to learn about different periods of U.S. history, but it has developed into a phenomenal retail success story of overpriced Chinese-made junk sold in branded stores in high-end shopping malls (like, oh, say, the Stanford Shopping Center). It’s a big deal for the 9-12 year old crowd.
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Inside Out
Time for a bit of self-indulgence; I’m taking my family out to a matinee of Pixar’s Inside Out. See you later!
My Bodyguard
Slope Cinema proudly presents, free of charge, one of my favorite movies from when I was a kid:
This Actually Might Be Decent
The More They Stay The Same
(Self-Interested Preface: if you cashed in today, thanks partly to Slope, feel free to kick me a few bucks. I hardly ever mention this, but for those of who don’t want to subscribe to Slope+, you might want to put something in the proverbial tip jar every blue moon. Now is your chance! Here’s the link.)
As I promised, I wanted to do a post that had nothing to do with Greece or charts, just for a change of pace. Because I don’t know about you, but after the past 72 hours, I’m exhausted!
One of my favorite “fun” books is a 1995 offering called Hey Skinny!, which is a collection of full-page color ads that were published in comic books in the 1940s and 1950s. I’ve thumbed through the book many times, but it dawned on me that even though we live in an age where a product released a month ago is “ancient history”, these artifacts from six decades ago still speak to the same immutable human desires (which are basically to acquire resources and protect them). There are analogs for just about every product in this thin volume.
