Highlights from Dear Highlights

Dolls of Our Lives

Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney

Society & Culture, History

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Picture it: you are sitting in a doctor's office some time in your childhood. What magazine is strewn about the waiting area?

For this episode, we tackled a publication that is probably tucked away in the recesses of your memory bank: Highlights Magazine. For decades, young people have sent letters to Highlights, a magazine especially designed by psychologists for kids*.* Some of these letters have been preserved in an archive in Ohio. Dear Highlights is a curated collection of some of these letters and a kind of "time capsule" of childhood. We talk about what changes over time in these letters--and what doesn't change in the responses. We also learn a thing or two from the editors' replies, such as how to get Baby Beluga out of your head once it's stuck (a real question asked of Highlights staff).

Original air date: April 20, 2022

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to American Girls the Podcast. This is the show where we're reliving the American
0:15.4	girls series book by book. Except here on Patreon where we're doing both what you and what we want that
0:22.2	we think lives within the world of our show.
0:25.0	I'm Mary.
0:26.0	I'm Allison.
0:27.0	Allison, how are you today?
0:29.0	What brings you here?
0:31.0	How are things?
0:32.0	How is life.
0:33.2	I was contemplating before we recorded,
0:35.6	am I in a goofist mood or a gallant mood?
0:38.6	Does that sentence make any kind of coherent sense to you?
0:44.0	Yes, it does and I feel like there's nothing worse than if somebody was like you're kind of reminding me of Goofist right now like that be really tough, like that would be tough to hear.
0:54.8	We are talking today about highlights, which burst, Guofus and Gallant, for better or for worse.
1:01.3	You know, among other things, yeah.
1:03.0	I mean, I don't know about you,
1:05.1	but it's like, when I think about,
1:07.3	you know, there's that line and you've got mail,
1:08.9	it's like, you know, in the fall,
1:11.0	I wish I could send you a bouquet of like sharpened pencils and
1:14.0	school supplies or whatever it's like you know if you're in a doctor's office I wish I could
1:19.3	send you a bouquet of highlights magazines because like that's the place I most associate it with
	...

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