At Amazon today, the best-selling item in the Toys & Games category is the Insect Lore Live Butterfly Garden, which encourages children to “watch them grow and let them go.” The garden has been a top 100 sales item for 1640 straight days, far longer than even the longest surviving Lepidoptera last. Also flying in the top ten of the category is a rocket you launch by stomping, two different toy helicopters and angry birds. Half the things take wing.
In the books category, an inspirational tome called Charge by a rich motivational maverick holds down the number two spot, its big go-go energy sandwiched between two erotic picaresques about power, self, submission and sex called, respectively, Fifty Shades of Gray, Book One and Fifty Shades Darker, Book Two. It’s a ménage a trois of amped up Id—or what happens when we learn we can’t fly.
