“Playgrounds are only possible when we bracket the potential boredom or trauma in the things we encounter so that their material properties can guide us to new ways of engaging them. The crappy Instagram, Shore’s uncommon places, and the Mad Men crew’s thrift-store scavenging for set decoration all do the same thing. They recast something familiar in a relatively minor way, one that yields very little to our human desires unless we quiet them through physical therapy—by working with them, by manipulating them in our heads and then our hands. By playing with them. The”