Squish Toys Won the Summer

Squish Toys Won the SummerNear twilight on a Saturday in May, my kids and I met up with a few other families on the lawn behind the New York Hall of Science, the site of the Queens Night Market, a weekly gathering of around seventy food venders and almost as many cuisines from around the globe. I gave my nine-year-old son a respectable fold of cash to spend among the stalls; after a goodly interval, he returned with a fun-sized bamboo steamer that held a single, perfectly pinched bao. The dough was, upon inspection, actually polyurethane. A growing boy could extract no calories or nutritional value from this variety of dumpling. My son told me not to worry, though, as he’d also purchased a can of ginger ale.Why would a kid be willing to skip dinner in the name of fake food? It speaks to the inscrutable sway of childhood fads, even if our summer of the squishy-food toy has not quite reached the unhinged heights of last year’s Labubu mania. The squish menu is extremely narrow, dominated by facsimile dumplings and uncanny sticks of butter, whose “slow-rise foam” allows for hours of satisfying compression and expansion. The aesthetic and qualitative range is somewhat wider: the bao on offer may come in a realistic wheaty hue, or in neon pink or bedazzled gold, or it might wear a friendly emoji face. In many ways, these doodads seem like an offshoot of the ongoing craze for NeeDoh squish toys, which likewise offer the comforts of the stress ball and vital early lessons in consumerism. Young squish hunters, like all savvy shoppers, value scarcity and authenticity—the “real” squish bao, it seems, are made by a company called RMS. All the other dumplings, I am told, are fake.I sent a letter to my eleven-year-old, still at sleepaway camp, asking for her feedback from out in the wild on the squishy-food phenomenon. She wrote back that squishies, “like most trends, have died out (or are dying out),” but that their rise and fall had a salutary effect, as the “fad raised attention about our over-consumption and how desperate people are to fit in.” The news of squishy foods’ death had not yet reached her younger brother, however. A few days later, on a grocery run, he asked me to check if the store had a stick of butter, and I knew exactly which kind he meant.Editor’s PickA Political Awakening in Arab AmericaWhen Abdeen Jabara was eight, in 1948, and living in the small town of Mancelona, in Michigan, he watched his father’s face contort as he listened to Arabic voices on the radio. “All Abdeen could gather,” Rozina Ali writes, “was that something very bad was happening, somewhere very far away.” Ali shares Abdeen’s family’s story »Would we be happier, Joshua Rothman asks, if we found meaning not through abstractions, like the idea of fate, but through the physical things around us?High-level science books for infants and toddlers, such as “Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering!” and “Bath Time Physics,” are trending. Perhaps tech parents are readying their children to work.America’s Semiquincentennial was celebrated across the country this summer with big, dumb, gluttonous fun. But did the festivities accommodate the nation’s contradictions?The most-clicked item in yesterday’s newsletter was about the White House accusing the Smithsonian of radical Marxism.Our Culture PicksA book: “A Scandal in Königsberg,” by Christopher Clark, is about an earnest Prussian clergyman with long shiny curls who, in the eighteen-thirties, attracted a cluster of devoted women followers.A movie: “I Want Your Sex” is a fantasia of male submission and female domination that defies today’s sex recession.A bite: At Fireboat, a repurposed F.D.N.Y. vessel from the nineteen-sixties, moored in the East River off of Brooklyn Heights, the vibes are a little Caribbean. Try the juicy jerk-chicken sandwich.Puzzles & GamesToday’s Crossword Puzzle: Mister, in Mexico City—five letters. Catalogues: Can you sort the items into the correct order? Shuffalo: Can you make a longer word with each new letter? Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.Daily CartoonLink copiedP.S. Jon Lovett, a host of “Pod Save America,” joins the New Yorker Radio Hour to answer listeners’ questions about the 2026 midterm elections.Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.