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Lego has a nostalgia problem. I do, too. Like Hollywood and its eternal cycle of remakes, the Danish company has found a bottomless treasure pot full of GenX and Gen Z people willing to burn their credit cards to turn their golden memories into bricks. By my count, 2025 alone brought a record-setting 16 sets related to old Lego properties and external IPs, shattering 2023’s previous peak of 9 sets. Whether that’s considered a problem or not depends on who you ask. You can argue that we (the people who keep buying these sets) are all the ones who have the problem. The Danish are just milking it. Building Lego soothes kids and adults alike but, when you are putting together these nostalgia-sets, there is an additional satisfaction factor. Its part of you, its what you know, like that old song that plays in your head from time to time and you have the urge to play on your headphones. As you assemble it, you can’t help but enjoy the way in which the Billund designers have abstracted the original objects and created details and features that seem impossible to reproduce at pixel-size brick resolution. Lego won’t share sales figures but, privately, insiders have hinted that these sets bring in lots of revenue, especially because they are large and complex with many pieces and high price tags. The year-over-year increase of new sets seem to confirms this: Between 2014 and 2022, the company released an average of 3.7 sets per year tapping into ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s themes. That number has more than doubled. From 2023 through 2025, Lego produced 31 nostalgia-focused setsa dramatic acceleration that establishes a new baseline. Many of these sets are part of the Lego Icons line, which launched in 2020 as a way to tap into the growing appetite from Lego’s adult customers. Other sets come through the Lego Ideas, launched in 2008, a sort of Kickstarter-ish platform that asks fans to submit designs for official Lego sets. These are then voted on by the community and a handful become commercial products each year. Until 2024, it was an open design call but that year Lego launched explicitly decade-targeted design challenges. First came the “Turn Back Time80s Challenge,” which generated more than 290 submissions. The challenge proved so successful that Lego immediately launched a “Build Your Nostalgia90s Throwback” competition for 2025. Rather than waiting for the nostalgia to happen organically, Lego is now actively soliciting it because it works. Now, if you are like meor my son, who is definitely not a Gen X but is growing up in Gen X cultureyou may be wondering whats cool this year. Well, thats why Im here, my friends. These are the best at every price point all the way up to the crazy nuts $1,000 Death Star (now, if you buy that one, then you will have a very real problem of the financial kind). [Photo: Lego] Home One Starcruiser This is a tiny reminder that Star Wars Original Trilogy sets remain a cornerstone of Lego’s nostalgia strategy. Released January 2025 for $70, this 559-piece Rebel Alliance frigate appeared in Return of the Jedi as part of the climactic Endor battle. It’s a compact set designed for anyone who wants a manageable Star Wars display without a 7,541-piece Millennium Falcon commitment. That it came out on the very first day of 2025 signals how central Star Wars remains to Lego’s calendar. [Photo: Lego] The Simpsons: Krusty Burger This year also brought a new Simpson set. Homer’s favorite fast-food joint comes to life with 1,635 pieces. The Krusty Burger has been serving fictional beef since the show’s early ’90s heyday, and Lego has captured every detail: the oversized signage, the drive-through window, and a small buildable Krusty the Clown figure. It’s the kind of set that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it isa shrine to a show that defined a generation’s sense of humor. At $210, it’s a reasonable price point for 1990s pop-culture archaeology. The set includes minifigures of Homer, Marge, Krusty, and the rest of Springfields best and finest. [Photo: Lego] Williams Racing FW14B & Nigel Mansell After releasing Ayrton Sennas McLaren last year, this is Lego’s tribute to one of Formula One’s most dominant seasons: 1992, when British driver Nigel Mansell piloted the Williams FW14B to legendary status. With 799 pieces and priced at $80, this is the kind of nostalgia that doesn’t rely on Hollywood but will appeal to the GenX and GenZ generations. The model includes working steering and suspension details that make it feel less like a toy and more like precision engineering translated into plastic. [Photo: Lego] Blacktron Renegade This one is pure Lego archaeology and made a lot of people happy back in the late ’80s. The Blacktron theme launched in 1987 and became one of the company’s most iconic design languagesa line of villainous space vehicles with electric lime-yellow and black color schemes that defined entire childhoods, opposite from the late ’70s good guys of the Galaxy Explorer. The Blacktron Renegade, $100, resurrects that aesthetic with precision. [Photo: Lego] Minifigure Vending Machine This one emerged from Lego’s Ideas platform, and it is a meta-nostalgic deep cut. The 315-piece set is essentially a tribute to Lego’s own 1980s and ’90s theme history. The vending machine dispenses minifigures, but the real genius is that it functions as a shrine to classic Lego design eras. It’s designed to celebrate the Classic Space, Pirates, and Castle themes that defined childhoods. Priced at $100, it’s Lego essentially building a monument to itself, self-referencing nostalgia so dense that it risks becoming an emotional black hole. [Photo: Lego] Gremlins: Gizmo The 1,125-piece set captures Gizmo, the Mogwai creature from Gremlins, in brick form. The process of bringing Gizmo to life required Lego’s design team to solve problems that shouldn’t exist. How do you suggest fur texture with plastic bricks? How do you create a nose that reads as a nose without being literal? Lego senior model designer Chris McVeigh told me how he tackled the fur question by using a specific element he originally developed for Lego’s 2023 Architecture set of Himeji Castle: a small 2×2 plate with an upturned corner. “I decided to use that to give the effect of wispy hair flowing off the model,” McVeigh says. For the nose, he experimented with half-circle and full-circle plates, ultimately landing on a 2×2 round plate with subtle cutouts. “It’s one of the exciting things about Lego,” McVeigh explains. “The brain fills the blanks.” At $110, it’s priced in the mid-range for a detailed character build, which is appropriate for a creature that required months of design refinement to get exactly right. [Photo: Lego] The Goonies This 2,912-piece behemoth, priced at $330, recreates an iconic scene from Richard Donner’s 1985 adventure film. Born from Lego’s “Turn Back Time80s Challenge,” where it competed against more than 290 other submissions, the set includes buildable structures and minifigures of the main Goonies characters. It doesnt get more cultish than that. [Photo: Lego] Captain Jack Sparrow’s Pirate Ship OK, so this one is early aughts but, with Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp, it feels ’90s to me. Released in September, its backordered everywhere, becoming one of the companys hottest hits. The $380 set brings Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl to life with 2,862 pieces, recreating the iconic pirate ship from the 2003 film The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, complete with detailed rigging, a functioning ship’s wheel, a working cannon, and a brig with torture implements. Multiple minifigures come with the set, including Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, Elizabeth Swann, and Will Turner. [Photo: Lego] Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D This was a shocker for Lego aficionados, who are used to living in a Star Wars dominated world. Just for that, it became the champion of 2025 nostalgia releases with 3,600 pieces. Priced at $400, it reproduces the Starship Enterprise-D from TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994 and defined what Star Trek meant to millions of people who never watched the original. The model measures 23.5 inches long and includes a working saucer separation functiona feature so technically ambitious it required serious engineering. It has all the crew (nine minifigures), including Captain Picard. It’s also bundled with set 40768, the Star Trek Type-15 Shuttlepod, a 261-piece GWP that features opening wing doors and a detailed interior LCARS display. [Photo: Lego] Lego Game Boy The $60 set recreates the original 1989 Nintendo Game Boy in brick form with impressive accuracy. The measurements are almost identical to the original and it includes posable directional buttons, a pressable A/B button cluster, and a buildable cartridge slot. The set even includes minifigure-scale versions of classic Game Boy games like Tetris and The Legend of Zelda printed on the buildable cartridges. Its also my favorite set because you can actually make it into a real Game Boy using this kit. [Photo: Lego] Death Star This is no Lego Set. At 9,023 pieces and $1,000, this is a bloody actual moon. It is so big it must actually have its own gravity field. It is also the most expensive Lego set ever made, breaking the previous record held by both the Millennium Falcon UCS ($850) and the AT-AT UCS ($850). Released back in October, this Death Star is a cross-section cutaway of the Empire’s most infamous space station that features little vignettes from A New Hope and Return of the Jedi: the detention block, trash compactor, tractor beam control room, Moff Tarkin’s boardroom, and the Emperor’s Throne Room where Luke and Vader’s final confrontation takes place. It stands 27.5 inches tall and it is 31 inches wide. The build includes 38 minifiguresincluding three different Luke SkywalkersTatooine outfit, Stormtrooper disguise, and Return of the Jedis Jedi Knighttwo Han Solos, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Grand Moff Tarkin, and even the internet-famous Hot Tub Stormtrooper from the Lego Star Wars video games. [Screenshot: Lego Ideas] X-Files: The Truth Is Out There This set is not released yet, but it was announced in 2025 as the winner of Lego’s “Build Your Nostalgia90s Throwback” challenge. While it is currently in development with no official release date or price yet confirmed, the design won a competitive fan vote against four other finalists: Edward Scissorhands, The Fifth Element, Jumanji, and Buffy the Vampire Slayerall quintessential ’90s intellectual property. The fact that the X-Files won tells you everything about which generational cohort Lego is chasing right now. Its also a great fit for our times, as the show that defined paranoia and skepticism for everyone born between 1970 and 1990.
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In the world of the long-running kids show Cyberchase, Motherboard, a sort of digital queen and literal technocrat, is the beneficent but impaired leader of all of cyberspace. She iswe are to understanda legitimate ruler, yet faces constant attacks from the odious Hacker, a green-skinned android who dresses like a vampire and whose only goal is to sow chaos and eventually take control of Motherboards realm, which we might describe as something akin to a metaverse, or ever-expanding digital world. Luckily, a trio of human kids named Inez, Mattie, and Jackiea squadvisit cyberspace frequently, where they embark on missions to help protect the ever-embattled Motherboard from her nemesis. Theyre frequently assisted by Digit, a robotic cybird that guides them through various missions. Cyberchase is a publicly funded STEM-themed program created by the public television channel WNET Thirteen. Its been airing on PBS Kids since 2002. As such, every challenge the squad takes on can be answered with numbers, or at least some kind of mathematical concept. Sometimes, an episode involves a mission with subtraction, fractions, or even negative numbers! The whole point of the squads trials and tribulations is to teach children basic science, technology, engineering, and math concepts through adventures. Sandra Sheppard, who created the show and now serves as executive producer, says its writers keep a close eye on how well U.S. students are doing with math concepts, especially as general math performance in the country continues to decline: Incoming freshmen at the University of San Diego increasingly need remedial math education, according to placement test performance, and national U.S. high school math performance has been sinking for years, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress. Parents report that social media continues to be a major distraction for kids. In response, Cyberchase has adapted its content for the social media age, producing shorts that create snippets of its larger math lessons as well as online gaming content. For its upcoming season, slated to premiere in spring 2026, it has released its first seven-minute episodes, which are intended to find a midpoint between a full episode and short-form content. Fast Company chatted with Sheppard about public television in the age of streaming and TikTok, the value of the PBS Kids brand, and how shes adapting a beloved shows math content to meet American kids where they are. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. [Image: Thirteen] I have a very particular memory of learning about negative numbers before everyone else, and then revealing this secret knowledge that I had learned through Cyberchase. But I didn’t have a smartphone or a computer with the internet until high school. How can you possibly get kids to the show when youre competing with smartphones, chatbots, and TikTok? Over the last decade, if not more, the approach to reaching kids is really very multi-platform, because we know kids are using multiple devices and watching in a myriad of ways. I think our partners at PBS Kids have been great in developing products and tools so that kids can really watch anywhere. Cyberchase is on the PBS Kids Video app and it streams everywhere, including YouTube. We also offer games, and that continues to be a really important part of the learning. Thinking about getting our content where kids are watching is constantly on our mind, as is developing content for those platforms and experimenting on those platforms. That includes shorter-form content, vertical shorts, and different kinds of compilations. Have you had more success with some platforms rather than others? Probably most children watch our content on streaming. That being said, there still is a dedicated audience for linear broadcast. And it’s a very diverse audience. Across the platforms, full episodes continue to be the driver of engagement. That’s not to say short-form content isn’t popular, or compilations aren’t popular, but we find that kids are still really driven by story. A full episode is 22 minutes. We’ve been experimenting this coming season with seven-minute stories, a little more bite-sizeas long as they’re a full narrative, so kids can have that kind of rich experience of watching a full story. Can you talk a little bit more about the seven-minute episodes? They’ll be coming out in March. It allows us to focus on math concepts a little bit more simply in bite-size stories, and really focus on some of the characters that we know our audience loves. There are Buzz and Delete, our bumbling henchmen who are buddies and semi-lovable in their own right. We’ve got a whole series of shorts that feature them in these kind of friendship-oriented adventures. We can, in a short time, focus on a single strategy of subtraction, or focus on how to estimate using weight and why that’s an important tool. That’s not to say we’re moving away from long form, but it’s fun to experiment in that space. Those will be released digitally on all the PBS Kids platforms and YouTube. How do you compete with the whole of the internet using algorithm-driven engagement when trying to get kids to your math-based content? The PBS Kids brand is a very safe and trusted brand. For young children, parents, and families, we still guide many of their viewing experiences. And I think they see us as a trusted source of content. That’s not to say that there’s not lots out there and that it hasn’t become more fragmented. There are loads of choices. [Image: Thirteen] How do you measure the sort of uptake of the idas for kids? Is that something you study to make sure that they’re understanding math? How does that work? We do a lot of initial developmental research, where we put ideas in front of focus groups of kids and families and test them out as early scripts. That gives us the opportunity to tweak up front. But we’ve also done a number of studies with external evaluators to really look at: Are kids learning the specific content in the shows? The good news is that we are really kind of a proven research model in that kids do learn from the series. Something I’ve heard anecdotally from people I know who teach math is that kids seem to really be struggling. Especially after the pandemic, it seems like American students are really doing poorly in math. Whats the role of Cyberchase in that? There certainly have been some national reports from the National Center for Education Statistics and the American Education Panel that have shown some real concerns in terms of math knowledge and gaps. Post-COVID, there have been some widening gaps. Interestingly, in this season we made kind of a renewed commitment to focusing on topics like subtraction, which can be a complex topic for young children. For some, addition comes more readily. Subtraction, especially as a kind of mental map exercise, can be challenging. We are embracing topics that could use some extra support. We live in a world that is changing. We’re all inundated with data, some of it AI-driven, some of it not. We’ve also focused in the last couple of seasons on data science, not only collecting and representing data, but looking at it and making sense of it reasonably. Another topic that we’re tackling this season is fractions. I think that’s a topic that for a lot of kids takes a lot of reinforcement. Patterns are a foundational topic in math and a foundational topic in programming. Giving kids more exposure to patterns, all kinds of patterns, too. I’ll say one other theme that I’m really excited about is connecting math to civics and the community. Certainly some of that involves data, but we have a very special show that’s going to be released called Every Flipper Counts. Its set in this wonderful cyber site of Penguia where the penguins have to pick a new team captain for their belly bowll, and the squad comes in and they introduce voting as a fair way to decide. There’s a lot of math and figuring out how to set up a fair vote. How have the cuts to public media impacted you? As a station, were always looking at ways to be more relevant, more sustainable. We have some wonderful funders of Cyberchase who are very supportive. For decades, Cyberchase did receive funding from the National Science Foundation. And for the moment, that’s not happening. It’s a complicated time and we have to navigate a path forward and find new ways to be smart, be cost effective, and bring in new supporters. Final question: Is Cyberchase the metaverse? It is an imaginary cyber world. The metaverse term came later. It’s a whimsical, vast landscape of these wonderfully rich, imaginary cyber sites. Its given us, as writers, an unbelievable place to go.
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December 15, 2025the deadline for enrolling in a marketplace plan through the Affordable Care Act for 2026came and went without an agreement on the federal subsidies that kept ACA plans more affordable for many Americans. Despite a last-ditch attempt in the House to extend ACA subsidies, with Congress adjourning for the year on December 19, its looking almost certain that Americans relying on ACA subsidies will face a steep increase in healthcare costs in 2026. As a gerontologist who studies the U.S. healthcare system, Im aware that disagreements about healthcare in America have a long history. The main bone of contention is whether providing healthcare is the responsibility of the government or of individuals or their employers. The ACA, passed in 2010 as the countrys first major piece of health legislation since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, represents one more chapter in that long-standing debate. That debate explains why the health law has fueled so much political divisivenessincluding a standoff that spurred a record-breaking 43-day-long government shutdown, which began on October 1, 2025. In my view, regardless of how Congress resolves, or doesnt resolve, the current dispute over ACA subsidies, a durable U.S. healthcare policy will remain out of reach until lawmakers address the core question of who should shoulder the cost of healthcare. The ACAs roots In the years before the ACAs passage, some 49 million Americans15% of the populationlacked health insurance. This number had been rising in the wake of the 2008 recession. Thats because the majority of Americans ages 18 to 64 with health insurance receive their health benefits through their employer. In the 2008 downturn, people who lost their jobs basically lost their healthcare coverage. For those who believed government had a primary role in providing health insurance for its citizens, the growing number of people lacking coverage hit a crisis point that required an intervention. Those who place responsibility on individuals and employers saw the ACA as a perversion of the governments purpose. The political parties could find no common groundand this challenge continues. The major goal of the ACA was to reduce the number of uninsured Americans by about 30 million people, or to about 3% of the U.S. population. It got about halfway there: Today, about 26 million Americans, or 8%, are uninsured, though this number fluctuates based on changes in the economy and federal and state policy. Health insurance for all? The ACA implemented an array of strategies to accomplish this goal. Some were popular, such as allowing parents to keep their kids on their family insurance until age 26. Some were unpopular, such as the mandate that everyone must have insurance. But two strategies in particular had the biggest impact on the number of uninsured. One was expanding the Medicaid program to include workers whose income was below 138% of the poverty line. The other was providing subsidies to people with low and moderate incomes that could help them buy health insurance through the ACA marketplace, a state or federal health exchange through which consumers could choose health insurance plans. Medicaid expansion was controversial from the start. Originally, the ACA mandated it for all states, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled that it was up to each state, not the federal government, to decide whether to do so. As of December 2025, 40 states and the District of Columbia have implemented Medicaid expansion, insuring about 20 million Americans. Meanwhile, the marketplace subsidies, which were designed to help people who were working but could not access an employer-based health plan, were not especially contentious early on. Everyone receiving a subsidy was required to contribute to their insurance plans monthly premium. People earning $18,000 or less annually, which in 2010 was 115% of the income threshold set by the federal government as poverty level, contributed 2.1% of their plans cost, and those earning $60,240, which was 400% of the federal poverty level, contributed 10%. People making more than that were not eligible for subsidies at all. In 2021, legislation passed by the Biden administration to stave off the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic increased the subsidy that people could receive. The law eliminated premiums entirely for the lowest income people and reduced the cost for those earning more. And, unlike before, people making more than 400% of the federal poverty levelabout 10% of marketplace enrolleescould also get a subsidy. These pandemic-era subsidies are set to expire at the end of 2025. Cost versus coverage If the COVID-19-era subsidies expire, healthcare costs would increase substantially for most consumers, as ACA subsidies return to their original levels. So someone making $45,000 annually will now need to pay $360 a month for health insurance, increasing their payment by 74%, or $153 monthly. Whats more, these changes come on top of price hikes to insurance plans themselves, which are estimated to increase by about 18% in 2026. With these two factors combined, many ACA marketplace users could see their health insurance costs rise more than 100%. Some proponents of extending COVID-19-era subsidies contend that the rollback will result in an estimated 6 million to 7 million people leaving the ACA marketplace and that some 5 million of these Americans could become uninsured in 2026. Congressional gridlock over a healthcare bill continues. Policies in the tax and spending package signed into law by President Donald Trump in July 2025 are amplifying the challenge of keeping Americans insured. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the Medicaid cuts alone, stipulated in the package, may result in more than 7 million people becoming uninsured. Combined with other policy changes outlined in the law and the rollback of the ACA subsidies, that number could hit 16 million by 2034essentially wiping out the majority of gains in health insurance coverage that the ACA achieved since 2010. Subsidy downsides These enhanced ACA subsidies are so divisive now in part because they have dramatically driven up the federal governments healthcare bill. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of people receiving subsidies doubledresulting in many more people having health insurance, but also increasing federal ACA expenditures. In 2025, almost 22 million Americans who purchased a marketplace plan received a federal subsidy to help with the costs, up from 9.2 million in 2020a 137% increase. Those who oppose the extension counter that the subsidies cost the government too much and fund high earners who dont need government supportand that temporary emergencies, even ones as serious as a pandemic, should not result in permanent changes. Another critique is that employers are using the ACA to reduce their responsibility for employee coverage. Under the ACA, employers with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance, but for companies with fewer employers, that requirement is optional. In 2010, 92% of employers with 25 to 49 workers offered health insurance, but by 2025, that proportion had dropped to 64%, suggesting that companies of this size are allowing the ACA to cover their employees. Diverging solutions The U.S. has the most expensive healthcare system in the world by far. The projected increase in the number of uninsured people over the next 10 years could result in even higher costs, as fewer people get preventive care and delayed healthcare interventions, ultimately leading to more complex medical care Federal policy clearly shapes health insurance coverage, but state-level policies play a role too. Nationally, about 8% of people under age 65 were uninsured in 2023, yet that rate varied widelyfrom 3% in Massachusetts to 18.6% in Texas. States under Republican leadership on average have a higher percentage of uninsured people than do those under Democratic leadership, mirroring the political differences driving the national debate over who is responsible for shouldering the costs of healthcare. With dueling ideologies come dueling solutions. For those who believe that the government is responsible for the health of its citizens, expanding health insurance coverage and financing this expansion through taxes presents a clear approach. For those who say the burden should fall on individuals, reliance on the free market drives the fixon the premise that competition between health insurers and providers offers a more effective way to solve the cost challenges than a government intervention. Without finding resolution on this core issue, the U.S. will likely still be embroiled in this same debate for years, if not decades, to come. Robert Applebaum is a senior research scholar in gerontology at Miami University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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