Our Fads, Ourselves

5:11Naomi Fry:we've been swimming through the kind of wetter environs of labubu love and desire but let's go dry for one second because i fear that many of our listeners much like myself literally like 48 hours ago might need a bit of a basic kind of gloss on what the hell is the labubu when it was created, et cetera, et cetera. Alex, Vincent, does one of you want to give us kind of bullet points of what this little friend is?

5:46Alexandra Schwartz:As I understand it, the Lububu was initially only available in two dimensions as a character in a children's book called The Monsters by K. Sing Lung. A Chinese company, Popmart, made Lung's character into a toy. Popmart sort of deployed all these marketing tactics to an important thing that has to happen in these cases, which is like sort of create scarcity and excitement at the same time. And from there, it was like a slow roll of usually celebrities sort of flaunting their collections of these things. Lisa from Blackpink, also Lisa, we've discussed her on this podcast because she is in the most recent installation of White Lotus.

6:29Alexandra Schwartz:Her collection, which she started showing off in 2024 four through her various social media feeds is sort of credited with sparking the current craze.

6:39Vinson Cunningham:Totally. And now we've seen them everywhere, frequently attached to handbags. Let's talk for a second about what this thing looks like.

6:45Naomi Fry:Much like all other LeBooBoo's, he has these like little ears. His extremities and his face are bare and rosy. The rest is covered with a thick pelt of fur. and he's mostly pinkish, I'd say, with some touches of lavender and a little bit of a light baby blue. And his eyes are beautifully kind of glittery. It's like a whole galaxy in there. He is grinning maniacally.

7:18Vinson Cunningham:Exactly. The sailing characteristic is it has a touch of evil. The labubu would not be as popular as it was in this day and age without a little touch of evil. But I want to say one other thing about the origin of the Lububu that I have not seen widely discussed, but I believe should be part of the conversation, if I may. Kaysing Long, the artist who creates the image of the Lububu, born in Hong Kong, lives in the Netherlands. And there's much that's being made of the Lububu as a Chinese cultural phenomenon being spread to the rest of the world. But I just, if I may, you know, touch lucky for a moment here.

7:54Vinson Cunningham:Luck. When I saw these little faces with their kind of cute, demonic, toothy smiles, I knew immediately who this was. It is a wild thing from Where the Wild Things Are. Yeah. The classic Maurice Sendak children's book. That is a good book, yeah. And I'm not bringing this up to say Kaysing Lung stole the design from Maurice Sendak, just to show how slippery these kinds of cultural boundaries can be. And I think the fear factor of where the wild things are and the excitement factor is kind of similar to what makes the labubu so cute but also frightening. But this didn't come out of nowhere.

8:29Alexandra Schwartz:I like what you're saying, Alex, because like most of us, the labubu is not a product of a particular or single culture or nation, but of diaspora and of migration of peoples and ideas.

8:41Vinson Cunningham:And ideas and art.

8:42Alexandra Schwartz:Absolutely.

8:43Vinson Cunningham:And I think the salient characteristic, if we can just get into it right here, like the demonic, the dangerous, the evil, the bad, the genius of the book Where the Wild Things Are is that a kid who is bad escapes from his house where his mom is angry with him, goes and becomes the king of these crazy labubu looking like monsters and then returns, gets to come safely back. So I think the labubu offers this deep psychological pleasure of confronting terror in a safe environment. Yes, totally.

9:13Naomi Fry:But guys, let's rewind a little bit. Do you remember when you first heard of LeBouBou's The Term or saw them without knowing what they were? Like, what's your history with this?

9:23Alexandra Schwartz:As often happens to me now, sort of living online, as I sometimes more than I would like to do, it came to me in two ways. One was just as a word. Because if you are still trapped in Elon Musk's haunted house called X, as I am, sometimes words just come to you. Sure. And you kind of scroll past it. And I'm sure someone knows what that is. I don't yet. And usually what happens is I know it's something, but I don't want to find out yet. I don't look. It's like I'm letting this sort of purely lexical information just build up in my head. And one day I'll look. And then on the other hand, I was seeing pictures of these gremlins.

10:08Alexandra Schwartz:And again, scrolling past them, I'm sure that they mean something. And I am opting out. I don't know what they are. And all of a sudden, when I finally looked it up and I realized that this was this, and then, oh, wait, I cannot believe people have been talking about this for like three months straight while I've been sort of dodging it. You know, something that, by the way, has created over$2 billion in revenue for the aforementioned Pop Mart just in the first half of 2025. This huge, real capital creating phenomenon sort of came to me in like glances and whispers. And like I had to take the Kierkegaardian leap of faith into knowing what the fuck it was.

10:47Naomi Fry:Yeah, that's exactly how I encountered it, too. I was like, I heard kind of like, LeBubu, LeBubu in the background. Its name is on the wind. And then like on Canal Street, I would see like these little things which are not LeBubu, but in fact LeFouFou. It turns out, I didn't know at the time, which are fake LeBubus. Because of course, the fake industry is also a huge driver of revenue because it's so hard to get these real ones. So, of course, the whole cottage industry of false idols has cropped up, you know, and it was kind of ambiently in the background. But it's only coalesced in like the last couple of months.

11:23Naomi Fry:Alex, what about you?

11:25Vinson Cunningham:In a more traditional way. I found out about it. I'm just going to say it from the New Yorker's newsletter written by Gia Tolentino. Yes. Our colleague at the end of July. OK. And, you know, I like to think that there's someone even more ignorant than I out there who's going to hear about it here for the first time.

11:43Naomi Fry:Oh, absolutely.

11:44Vinson Cunningham:Probably my two parents. No offense to them.

11:46Alexandra Schwartz:Welcome to hell, horses.

11:48Naomi Fry:Welcome to hell. I mean, I am slowly but surely reaching the stage of, like, learning about trans from, like, the times styles section. You know, the thing that people always made fun of, of, like, you know that if it's, like, in the times, it's already done. Meanwhile, I'm like, oh, interesting.

12:06Vinson Cunningham:These things serve a purpose. Absolutely. You know what? I can't. I'm not going to judge us. It's just it is what it is. And it's, you know, you're totally right. It's like a phrase like coronavirus or Japanese lanternfly. It means nothing until it means everything. And so it is with the boo-boo. And what's interesting to me about the little boo-boo in a few ways is, first of all, it doesn't cost that much if you can find one. I think the regular ones are$28. Of course, there's a scarcity issue, which drives up the resale value online. And let's just be real for a second. No offense to you, Lububu, but any number of stuffed animals feel like this.

12:41Vinson Cunningham:It's the popularity of the thing itself that has fueled the craze more and more. And I will also say, when I went on my brief and quixotic mission to try to find us a Lububu before I realized that that had been already accomplished, I posted on my Instagram. And the flood of response that came in was so fascinating. What a polarizing object. Many, many people responded along the lines of, get that demon away from me.

13:07Alexandra Schwartz:Okay, good.

13:07Vinson Cunningham:Don't even look at one. Good to know. This is a horror. This is bad for the culture. The fact that people are so obsessed with this little plastic doll is sick. Other people said, yeah, my kid has six of them. Wow. My friend in Stockholm, Josephine, told me that at her son's school, they're banned. Can't go in there with a labubu. Too distracting. Reminds me of the fidget spinner thing from a few years ago. I remember the fidget spinner. Yeah, there you go.

13:29Naomi Fry:But, you know, it's interesting. You asked for comments online on Instagram. But of course, shopping for the thing itself happens mostly, largely online. And the unboxings of these of these toys also happen online. And that is an incredibly popular genre on TikTok of because it includes the element of surprise. I mean, unboxing in general is huge on social media. You know, you get your pair of sneakers, you get your Chanel bag, your beauty haul, and you unbox it in front of the camera and post it to your followers. But here there is the added element, as I said, of the person doing the unboxing as well as the viewers.

14:11Naomi Fry:They're learning about what's within at the same time. So it has that inbuilt element of suspense and payoff. And I was wondering if we could maybe look at there's like a TikTok that is a kind of a supercut of all of these unboxings. Right. OK. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's the golden boo-boo.

14:34Vinson Cunningham:This is real 24-carat gold. Here we go. Who do we have?

14:40Naomi Fry:OK. A woman with pink hair got a seemingly rare golden boo-boo. Oh, my God. Okay, a woman is going crazy for unboxing like a brown-pelted... Oh. I'm not looking for... Okay, a pistachio-colored labubu is revealed.

15:00Vinson Cunningham:Okay, these people are all adults, by the way. But are they? I mean... Yeah, I think that's part of... You say, you know, Nomi, and you're totally right, that unboxing is and has been for quite a while its own phenomenon, like its own genre of video online. and yeah, it's you experience vicariously the pleasure of opening a gift. Toy surprise. And who has not known such a pleasure?

15:22Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

15:22Vinson Cunningham:Famously, children love to rip open wrapping paper and so do many adults. So do we all. So do we all. And here out of it is born your very own LaBooBoo and yeah, the surprise is which one you got. It does remind me of a toy that was very big in my preschool years called Puppy Surprise. I'm not familiar with puppy's game. I think Puppy Surprise. It was made by Hasbro. And there was also Kitty Surprise. Now you're talking. You were gifted a heavily pregnant plush dog or cat.

15:52Alexandra Schwartz:I was going to ask if there was...

15:53Vinson Cunningham:And you ripped open their womb. It's giving alien. Yes. The child would tear open the Velcroed womb to discover how many puppies or kitties were inside.

16:03Alexandra Schwartz:That is a surprise. Yeah.

16:05Vinson Cunningham:And the excitement was the number you got. Giving Caligula. It's 100 % giving Caligula.

16:11Alexandra Schwartz:Hearing that and having watched those videos, I feel deeply unsettled. I feel like the first time I watched the documentary about that, like Nixxiom cult.

16:20Naomi Fry:Oh, yeah.

16:20Alexandra Schwartz:Like, oh, this is the darkest. What I just saw seemed like forced and false enthusiasm. The child in this situation should be airlifted out of their household. What the fuck?

16:29Vinson Cunningham:And yet, have you never known pleasure? Have you never known excitement?

16:33Alexandra Schwartz:I have. And I like to think that in a younger, more tender time, you know, it could have been me.

16:43Naomi Fry:In a minute, beanie babies, cabbage patch kids, and 17th century Dutch tulips. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

17:00Hey, listeners.

17:02Alexandra Schwartz:This is Liz Mainz-Amanzadi, The New Yorker's puzzles and games editor. If you're someone who likes making lists and organizing your bookshelf, we think you'll love Catalogs, our new daily game that challenges you to put things in order based on a hidden rule. You might be asked to sort peppers by spiciness, world capitals by population, or Martin Scorsese movies by release date. You can play Catalogs every day at newyorker.com slash games and in the New Yorker app for iOS or Android. Here's a helpful hint. The app gives you free access to our entire archive of catalogs, along with our word scramble game Shuffalo and the mini crossword.

17:40Alexandra Schwartz:So download the New Yorker app for new games to play every day.

17:49Naomi Fry:Hey, listeners. Just wanted to remind you to make sure you check out the most recent issue of The New Yorker. It's our arts and culture issue, and it contains features from our very own Alex Schwartz and Alex Barish. Alex Schwartz wrote a beautiful profile of the author and poet Patricia Lockwood, and Alex Barish wrote a fascinating piece about the film studio A24. They're both just great, as is the rest of the issue. It's out on New Stands now, or you can find all of the articles available on newyorker.com. Hope you'll take a look.

18:25Naomi Fry:Okay, guys, we've been talking about the Lububu, but I want us to get bigger picture for a second, get a little bit historical, and look at some other fads of the past. Things have gone down in a not dissimilar way to the Lububu craze that might be pertinent to discuss. We've been there before. and might be important to our understanding of what's happening right now. Who wants to maybe jump in and start us off on this exploration?

18:59Vinson Cunningham:I want to go right in and talk about what to me is the salient point of comparison here, and that is the Beanie Baby. Because the LeBuboos are, I think, the biggest toy trend since the LeBeanie Baby. The LeBeanie Baby. The LeBeanie Baby. Okay. Since the LeBeanie Baby. That's nice.

19:16Alexandra Schwartz:That sounds like miscegenation to me, and I don't like it.

19:19Vinson Cunningham:Oh, God. Since the little Beanie Babies of the 1990s. And of course, this was right when I was at my most vulnerable and formative. I was in elementary school when the Beanie Baby craze hit. and every day we would go across the street from my school to the drugstore candy store shop gyros and there were beanie babies suddenly there were beanie babies there and and the beanie babies became a source of obsession and delight you wanted them you wanted to collect them at some point i must have become aware that the phenomenon was enormous that not only was this a big deal, but that it was a big financial deal.

20:01Vinson Cunningham:Because what we now know is that the Beanie Babies were colliding with the early internet and especially early e-commerce in such a way that fueled the trend. Like there were certain Beanie Babies that were everywhere and there were certain ones that were super, super rare. And there was a whole collector's network online where people would pay a premium to buy the super rare ones. So other people would hustle out to buy those that they could then sell. And it was all happening on eBay, which was new at the time. This is really fascinating to me. And I think it's actually extremely relevant to LeBuboos, because LeBuboos, when you get down to it, are something to be bought and sold.

20:40Vinson Cunningham:That's what they are. And much like Beanie Babies, they are fueling new ways of doing that. I was listening to this new episode of PJ Votes' podcast, Search Engine, where he had on the journalist and podcaster Ryan Broderick talking about what TikTok is. And this was really interesting to me because, as you guys have pointed out, the boo-boos are this big TikTok phenomenon. And what Ryan Broderick was explaining was Americans tend to think of TikTok as a content creation platform. Actually, it's a commerce platform. It has its own attached app where you can buy things directly that are promoted on TikTok.

21:17Vinson Cunningham:So where something like YouTube or Instagram came into being so that people could create content and then the platform owners could sell advertising to the rest of us watching them. It's gone the other way of something like TikTok. People there are out making their own ads basically for this product. And the goal is to direct other people watching it to buy the product directly from like a TikTok affiliated commerce chain. So if you go back to the 90s, you have Beanie Babies bringing in e-commerce in this kind of pioneering way where suddenly people were like putting credit card details online in a way that seems obvious to us now but didn't at the time yeah no definitely yeah it's an interesting thing

21:55Alexandra Schwartz:as you mentioned the beanie baby was a more well-made item um was it i think famously it was understuffed so that it would be more posable than other stuffed animals of the time because it wasn't chock full of stuffing you could it could sit you could you could recline it with the arm out so part of the appeal at least initially was a certain notion of quality but it's interesting because everything i totally agree with and remember everything that you just mentioned alex but i think i also remember that it was understood as a child's pursuit and there were two reasons that an adult would be into it either crazily kooky you know like Like some lady that was like a beanie baby enthusiast would be like a spinster archetype or something, right?

22:46Alexandra Schwartz:Or a hoarder or whatever. Or, to your point, rapacious capitalist. Yes. Using the beanie baby as a financial instrument. Yeah. Which I think is maybe characteristic of this whole trends idea. Yeah. At some point, it becomes more of a security or whatever, something to be traded.

23:04Naomi Fry:A nest egg.

23:05Alexandra Schwartz:Right, right. Whereas I think there is a sort of sane adult who can like put their labubu on their Telfar bag today. Sure. And we just are like, oh, that's like an ironic thing that they're doing. Indulging in the trend, but not being either like Mr. Scrooge McDuck or Crazy Lady. There is a third thing that an adult can do with this today. Sure.

23:29Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think you're right. I think labubus have become part of fashion. In that way, they do remind me of the Dutch tulip craze. Okay.

23:37Naomi Fry:Dare we go there? Say more. Because that, I think, combines both the kind of like speculative market element that you were talking about, as well as the kind of fashion element that, you know, you guys were just mentioning.

23:52Vinson Cunningham:Well, it turned out that the Dutch loved tulips. And they didn't know it until they got their hands on some. And they didn't get their hands on some until some traders brought them from, where else? Asia. It's, we're right back to the present. The labuboos are coming west. The tulips came west. They wind up, these tulips, these special flowers that look nothing like native European flowers, in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. And suddenly everyone has to have them. There are special breeds that are stripy. Everyone wants those. And if you're anybody, you're going to have some tulips planted.

24:26Vinson Cunningham:And the price goes out of control. And people are putting down simply insane sums of money to have flowers, which, as we all know, will wither. Mm-hmm. Planted in their homes. Mm-hmm. Nothing gold can stay. There was a big crash after this wild appreciation of the value of tulip bulbs. And yeah, it does remind me of the LeBouBou thing in a sense in that fashion is an interesting combination of showing personality but also showing that you're with it with a broader trend and how you work within a broader trend. Yes. To show individuality. To distinguish oneself. Yeah, it makes total sense to me to see these LeBouBous on like very obvious branded bags.

25:08Vinson Cunningham:I saw one on a Birkin bag. OK, Birkin, as we all know, is deeply inaccessible. But, you know, the LV logo, seeing it on Chanel bags, which themselves are just very expensive LeBouBous. I mean, I feel cynical for saying that, but I really believe it. No, totally.

25:24Alexandra Schwartz:With the notable exception. And this goes again. So the LeBouBous is about, yes, this conspicuous consumption. Yes, a notion of status and individuation within that stripe, but it also has irony. Whereas I think the Dutch tulip, the actual bag is about those things, but without the layer of irony. It almost seems like the ironic trend therefore becomes like a release of steam from the unironic mass of trends that we all engage in. I have to keep up the suspension of disbelief in my life that I'm not just following trends with what I wear, where I go, whatever. That I need an escape hatch that I can make fun of that replicates this larger structure in my life.

26:11Naomi Fry:But I want to say something. I think you're totally right. It's the kind of like fashion light, say, or like, you know, something that's a little bit more playful, etc. But as we know and as we've seen these objects, you know, there is an element of earnestness. There is an element of, say, like desperation even that goes counter to the kind of, oh, yeah, this is just a lark. This is like a little, you know, game that I played to show that I'm not all that serious. And there are many TikToks online showing the kind of like, oh, my God, like, here I am again at this drop, you know, like trying to like get my hands on this new.

26:56Naomi Fry:Yeah. Yeah. The drop. And, you know, I was feeling a little bit like superior, you know what I mean? Like I was feeling like, oh, you know, this is not for me. This is for the stupid masses on TikTok. I wasn't really thinking that, but you know what I mean. I mean, I was like, oh, I don't understand why they're so like obsessed and desperate. But then I thought, oh, but I can totally I have been in situations which are more like slightly fashion, you know, like I haven't done that a long time. But like the Supreme website or the Supreme, I've never stood in line in the Supreme store, but like a new drop comes every Thursday.

27:29Naomi Fry:Yeah.

27:30Alexandra Schwartz:And people are like trying really hard, trying really hard.

27:33Naomi Fry:Creating bots. It's like there are situations where it feels to be more explicable why people are doing these things. And, yeah, an irony doesn't really play a part in those pursuits.

27:44Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think the irony thing is interesting because I think it is the case, but it also isn't the case. Like, some people may have an ironic approach to it. You know, when Rihanna wears a labubu and she goes about her day, there's a hint of irony to me. I think she probably enjoys it, but, you know.

28:01Alexandra Schwartz:She's the coolest person on the planet, so therefore there has to be.

28:03Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, exactly. And I also just saw Naomi Osaka walk into the U.S. Open with a bedazzled LeBubu on her bag. And that's a little it's not ironic in the sense of like, I know this is done, but I'm wearing it. I think she's into it, but it's a little bit of a wink at the culture. It's a sense like she's cool. She's with it. But the adult women I just saw weeping as they opened as they ripped open their LeBubus, they're feeling it. And it reminds me of, in that sense, right, every craze like this comes from some deep desire that at the base level is the same desire. Look at the Cabbage Patch craze.

28:37Vinson Cunningham:Look at the Cabbage Patch Riot of 1983.

28:40Alexandra Schwartz:I still have my Cabbage Patch kid, by the way.

28:42Vinson Cunningham:Really?

28:43Alexandra Schwartz:He was born in 1987. Oh, my God. His name is Luther. I can only imagine that the reference is to Luther Vandross, who was a god in my household. That's so cute. And he still lives at my mother's house.

28:52Vinson Cunningham:That's deep and sweet.

28:53Alexandra Schwartz:That's adorable. I don't think she was part of the riot, though. I don't remember the riots. She was not there on January 6th.

28:57Naomi Fry:The riots were, it reached a height, I believe, like Black Friday, 1983. People were, like, the fur went flying. I mean, like, dolls were torn limb from limb. People were trampled. And I remember it as a kind of, like, example as a non-American. For me, it was like, look at these crazy Americans. You know, it was like the ur-example of, like, American consumerism. consumerism and the lengths people will go to, the price they'll pay either in tooth and limb or in actual money to get their hands on this new product, which in and of itself isn't anything special. And yet there is something about this particular formation that makes it like desirable like nothing else.

29:42Vinson Cunningham:But I do think the difference now is that it's all coming to us from the internet to begin with. So the exposure is off the hook. You're already being fed this and digesting this in the virtual realm and it's imprinting itself on you. And then it becomes part of this kind of like aesthetic package that you are being delivered that, again, strikes that unstable mix of feeling like something is self-defining about the aesthetic choices you're making while knowing that they've been prepackaged algorithmically and given to you. And so I was reading this really interesting piece by our colleague Kyle Chayka, published online great piece.

30:17Alexandra Schwartz:IRL brain rot. Yes. And the lore of the labubu.

30:21Vinson Cunningham:So basically in his piece, Kyle is talking about first his unsuccessful quest to obtain a labubu. And he states to me, you know, nakedly and vulnerably that he actually wants one of these because other people are wanting them. He doesn't get one, but he connects this to these other aesthetic fads that are happening right now in the culture, such as everything matcha. Dubai chocolate is a thing. And he's talking about these kinds of amalgamations that form in an internet-y way where nothing is pure. Dubai chocolate involves a whole bunch of mixtures of pistachio, we can get into it, condensed into this chocolate bar.

30:58Vinson Cunningham:and how all of these things, the kind of repulsiveness, but addictiveness, the pleasure with an edge coalesces and gives you the sense of, like, internet-y one thing after another, things smashing together, mashed together, but seeking them out in real life. Yeah. His argument is significantly more complex than that, but that's part of it. I have a reveal for us. I have an unboxing to do for us. Wait, what? You brought something else? I brought something else. Oh, my God. Because we're talking about trends, And we really have to have the we have to have the objects on the table.

31:31Naomi Fry:Please. OK, so Alex has just pulled out a beautiful green pistachio green package adorned with dripping chocolate driblets. This is Dubai chocolate.

31:47Alexandra Schwartz:So good at describing it. It's filled with kataifi and pistachio.

31:52Vinson Cunningham:Oh, my God. It's fat. Wow. OK, here we go. It's got some real volume. Should I break it? Yeah, I think you should open it so we can see the inside. Because that's like the traditional way. Just show us the inside.

32:05Alexandra Schwartz:Oh, my God.

32:09Naomi Fry:Sorry. Disgusting. Okay. Do you want to? Yeah, I'm going to try a piece.

32:13Vinson Cunningham:You take a piece. I'll take a piece. So much like the LeBoubo, I will say now that I'm seeing this in person, what's very distinctive about this is that it is not appetizing looking at all. And maybe that's a cultural thing. Maybe other people disagree. But I am seeing cow dung when I look at this.

32:29Naomi Fry:This is psychotically sweet. It's interesting.

32:35Alexandra Schwartz:It's definitely more of like an experience than a comfort to which I will return.

32:41Vinson Cunningham:I think it's good. It's not giving me flavors I never knew before and taking me to new realms. But, you know, doesn't this say something about so much of the pleasure of these things is the anticipation? Like, this is why the booms go bust, too. because you're anticipating and anticipating and wanting and hunting and yearning and desiring. And then you eat the chocolate and it's good.

33:03Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

33:11Naomi Fry:There's plenty of precedent for LeBooBoo's. But are these newer fads different or worse than the ones we've seen in the past? This is Critics Alarch from The New Yorker. Stick around.

33:31Vinson Cunningham:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers.

33:42Naomi Fry:That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.

33:56Vinson Cunningham:Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

34:13Naomi Fry:So, you guys, we've been talking about fads. We've been talking about fads of our childhood. We've been talking about the tulip craze of the 17th century. And I was reminded of a particular chapter in one of the Little House on the Prairie books, which was my favorite. I'm sure I've mentioned it several times before over the last couple of years on the pod. This was in Little Town on the Prairie, I believe. And what was happening was Mary, the eldest Ingalls sister, she was blind. She was going to college for the blind in Vinton, Iowa. and Laura, the middle sister, and Caroline, the mother, were preparing her clothing that she would take with her to college.

34:58Naomi Fry:And of course, they were sewing everything by hand, knitting everything by hand. This was, you know, the 1880s. There was no TikTok then to order things from. There was certainly no TikTok to order things from, but also the mechanisms of knowledge and learning about what the trend was in women's clothing particularly, were very hard to come by and access. And so the question was, they were sewing her a dress, and they wanted to know, were hoop skirts coming back in? Or were they out? They wanted her to look stylish and ready for any occasion when she goes to college. They had like a lady's guidebook, but it was like two years old.

35:45Naomi Fry:And I was thinking about that in comparison to the insane acceleration, the hyper immediacy of this moment. We've never seen kind of a turnover as quick as this.

35:59Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think, you know, one thing that's happening now, which is a continuum and an acceleration of earlier trends that go back to the hoop skirt and then move through the big trends of my own youth, which all had to do with brand names, just like wearing branded clothing. Don't forget the designer denim craze of the early to mid-aughts. Exactly. It's just showing that you are a consumer and what you're consuming. You're a knowing consumer. You're a canny consumer. You're a canny consumer, I guess, is the point. Although the more popular these things are, the less canny it seems to me. I mean, we're all serving as the vectors for capitalism, for capital to spread itself and where it's kind of willing agents.

36:40Vinson Cunningham:Yes. There are two particular things about the LaBubu situation and also honestly Dubai chocolate and Stanley Cups. Let's put let's just roll Stanley Cups up in there. We're talking about a super popular water bottle that people want to have 100 of because you got to catch them all. Like you have the got to catch them all instinct. It's always going to be there. It's the collector's instinct. And you can have it about, you know, you can be Nabokov and have it about butterflies. Or you can be a TikTok mom who has it about Stanley Cups. But the two things about the boo-boos that really strike me now are, one, this item is fundamentally junk.

37:16Vinson Cunningham:What I mean is, yeah, there may be people like Vincent and his Cabbage Patch doll. The boo-boo is going to survive somewhere. Like Luther and Vincent. The boo-boo is going to be on someone's shelf years from now. But many, many more labubus are going into a landfill and people are collecting junk and kind of reveling in junk at a time when there is a great deal of anxiety and pressure about the physical state of the world. Our environment is degraded. We all know that we need to be accumulating a lot less stuff, making a lot less cheap stuff, that it's not great. But I almost feel like there is a maybe nihilistic, but maybe also just like, I want everyone to stop telling me about how bad the world is.

38:00Vinson Cunningham:I want to just have my fun and collect my little boo-boos. okay yes they're contributing to the to carbon in the atmosphere and sure they're going to just sit in a landfill for a billion years but let me just have my fun right now there's kind of like a revolt yeah and leave me alone leave me alone stop telling me what to do and a similar thing strikes me with dubai chocolate and like opposed to that i see the kind of whole maha thing of like you know only pure substances the whole trying to optimize trying to maximize and here there's this super indulgent, delicious, kind of Frankenstein-y treat.

38:31Vinson Cunningham:It's a lot of stuff at a time when we're being told, like, get clean and we should be suspicious of everything we put in our bodies. And yeah, there's a pleasure in that. So that's a kind of like, I feel like these two big cultural forces are clashing. And the second thing about it, to me, is the real childhood element of it.

38:50Naomi Fry:Yeah. And I think these two are connected. Like, Alex, when you were saying, you know, it's a sort of revolt in the sense of like, don't tell me what to do. You know, it's like life is hard enough. Like, I know everything is collapsing, but I want to hug this little, you know, there is something I think childlike about that attitude and far be it for me to, you know, I totally understand it. I probably have it myself, not with a little boo-boo, but with other things. who is the individual who is ideally most able and most justified in shutting out the world, right? It's a child. It's not a child's responsibility to pull his weight in the workforce.

39:32Naomi Fry:It's not a child's responsibility to make the world that has been fucked up by his elders into a better place to live. And, you know, that's adult work, right? To be a child is to be left alone in a lot of ways, in a lot of blessed ways that I think as adults we often idealize. I think childhood is difficult in many other ways that we don't give ourselves account of. But I think the desire to just like suck your thumb and like hold in your other hand like a little furry monster and shut out the world is very much connected.

40:07Alexandra Schwartz:It's interesting because like childhood is two-sided this way. On the one hand, you shut out the world, but on the other hand, you indulge in like facsimiles of what you perceive to be the wider world. Yesterday, I was at the playground with my kid and there was a kid in one section of the playground structure being like, to enter this room, you have to pay me what he said was a thousand million dollars. It was so cute. But he's already heard of capital and scarcity and commerce and he's playing with the concept. And it almost seems like today when like, you know, the gulf between economic strata is so like crazy that the upper middle class is playing out what they think is happening with the real rich.

40:56Alexandra Schwartz:You know, all of a sudden we get our little things and we like have a facsimile of economic behavior. It's nihilism, but it's also a kind of play acting at the unfathomable. This is maybe one theory of libubu libido.

41:12Naomi Fry:Yeah, libubu. Yeah, for sure. And also, I think the sort of make believe of capital. Remember NFTs? I mean, obviously, this was very a very real marketplace. Yes, but I just mean there weren't any real objects in the world. It was all virtual. And these ugly, ugly things, for the most part, bored apes and what have you, became worth, you know, thousands and even millions of dollars in some cases. And that speculative bubble then completely collapsed and these things returned to being complete trash, you know. Or not trash even, because it wasn't even real. It was just like a made-up, you know, object of desire.

41:56Naomi Fry:that suddenly lost its kind of like vaunted worth in one fell swoop.

42:02Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, and there is this fine line between collecting and speculating. The NFT situation was explicitly a speculation scheme that people thought, OK, I will retain the value of this and the value will grow. And I guess you try to offload it when you think you can. And, you know, it's part of the crypto phenomenon of speculation. speculation and yeah but you're not cuddling up with your hideous bored ape and touching its cozy hair i mean the reason why i think the child element is significant is i i have very mixed feelings about it one is a positive feeling that yes it's good to be kind to yourself yeah and to engage with your inner child and all the rest of it good you know do what makes you feel good The negative aspect of it is the self-infantilization aspect of it.

42:54Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. The head in the sand aspect, the becoming over-invested in a toy, not for the imagined pleasure that a toy brings you. Like, my kid is of the age where he's playing with stuffed animals all the time and speaking through them, seeing the world through them, creating character for them, as opposed to just like, oh, my God, I pulled this thing out of the bag and it's a really rare one. But the other thing about digital culture and self-infantilization, and I'm sorry if this feels like too obvious a point, but we are watching on the same media, on the same apps that we're looking at people joyfully opening their little boo-boos on, we're watching child death.

43:31Vinson Cunningham:I feel like a little bit crazy to have to put it as bluntly as this because it both seems so obvious and so like over the top to be talking about it right now. Yeah. But it's true. It's we're we're watching children suffering on apps that also show entertainment and shopping. I don't mean to sound like the resident scold of the roundtable. It's not a scold. It's just true. It just seems very striking to me. And it seems so indicative to me of a global culture of this kind of like vast and profound inequality. Yeah.

44:01Alexandra Schwartz:Well, similarly, speaking of NFTs and this whole world of financial speculation, the meme stock, GameStop, people jumping on and off of that stock and making its fluctuations go on a way that was like advantageous to them in the short term, happened as far as I remember it in the sort of deep throes of the pandemic. That there is a certain kind of nihilistic, thrill-seeking, acquisitive in shape that accompanies moments of extremity, kind of how you're describing. And sort of the closer these things become, the more mutually implicated they become, the more kind of, I don't know, dark they feel.

44:39Naomi Fry:How do you guys feel now about the boo-boos now that we've explored this newish thing in ways which we hadn't considered before? Like, are your feelings changed?

44:55Vinson Cunningham:Well, the thing itself, we got to return to the thing itself. The thing itself. Always return to the thing itself. Hi, Lucky. Let's check in with Lucky. Hi, Lucky. How are you? I believe it's luck. Oh, luck. Hi, luck.

45:06Alexandra Schwartz:But, you know, you meet your child and you give them a nickname. Right.

45:11Vinson Cunningham:Look, I'm not above admitting that it's cute and cuddly and seems like a fun little accessory. I think what I'd say is there's no greater power than the power of refusal. If you're feeling glum because you couldn't get your hands on a Lububu, if, you know, your local pop mart is sold out of this thing, touch grass. Isn't that what they say? Yeah. Touch grass. But do something else for a little while. I sound so dismissive, and yet only partially dismissive is all the people flooding my DMs who are just like, this thing is the end of culture. This thing is not the end of culture. Let's be very clear about that.

45:46Vinson Cunningham:No, it's a point and a line.

45:48Alexandra Schwartz:Enjoy them.

45:49Vinson Cunningham:Don't go crazy.

45:50Alexandra Schwartz:It would be pretty to think that it's the end of culture, but it is culture.

45:53Naomi Fry:Yeah. I think there's a difference between encountering this little friend and person as a singular object. It brings to mind Toy Story. when the protagonists, Buzz Lightyear specifically, realizes that he's not one of one, that there's a whole series of exactly uniform Buzz Lightyear's. But he is his own individual. You know, he has a subjectivity that has been kind of explored over the course of the movie. And that is a kind of a painful moment of schism. And so I think similarly, when I'm looking in, you know, the beautiful lavender glittery eyes of this little friend. I feel like she is right now in this moment singular to me, even though I know it's not true.

46:46Naomi Fry:And there is a difference between like holding a friend in your hand and speculating on many friends online.

46:55Vinson Cunningham:So I think what you're saying, Nomi, is that the labubu condition is the human condition. That is what I'm saying, Alex.

47:30Naomi Fry:mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics.

47:49Vinson Cunningham:Is Wuthering Heights really a love story? Should you be afraid of Virginia Woolf? And most importantly, is Mr. Darcy handsome enough to tempt you? This is The Secret Life of Books. I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer. And I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer. In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved. We reveal their secret histories, hidden players and big ideas behind the great books. We show how they came into being, why they matter and how they changed the world. The deeper we go, the weirder the questions.

48:25Vinson Cunningham:Is George Orwell's 1984 on some level a comedy? is Dracula, the Freddie Mercury of horror, and why do so many literary honeymoons go wrong? Whether you're a committed book nerd or just curious about the history of ideas, The Secret Life of Books is the podcast for you.