At Barclays, we're here for the land of football.

We're here for the Premier League.

And the Barclays Women's Super League.

We're here for the football chance for giving more girls a chance.

We're here for the grassroots and all the muddy boots. From schools to stadiums, we're here for it all.

Barclays, here for the land of football.

The thing about novelties in particular is, you know, they do open up these imaginative worlds.

They introduce you to things that you never saw before that you couldn't even conceive of. of the

of things that you never saw before that you couldn't even conceive of.

Wendy Wollison is a historian, professor, and author of the fascinating book,

Crap, a history of cheap stuff in America. The classes she teaches at Rutgers University Camden are described as the history of material and consumer culture used goods markets, alternative and criminal economies, and the history of capitalism.

Today, Wendy and I will do a little post- Christmas analysis of American consumer habits and dive deep into our historical

obsession with, as Wendy so artfully puts it, crap, or the mostly pointless, poorly made products that we continue

to buy year after year.

Our last episode covered, Sea Monkeys, a product that belongs to the category of novelty goods.

You know your x-ray specs, your fake vomit, your exploding cigars.

So now we're going to go into much more detail analyzing these definitively American items.

What they mean about our history and society and how we move forward as an enormous culmination

of all our plastic crap floats out in the ocean,

growing larger every day.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith,

and this is American hysteria.

...