The Brief

Unlike flash-in-the-pan toys, Barbie is still going strong after 64 years. She’s especially hard to ignore these days, thanks to Greta Gerwig’s relentlessly promoted "Barbie" movie. Her plastic face is everywhere, in high relief against blinding fuchsia backdrops.

Why has Barbie now endured for more than four generations?

Many people suggest that it has to do with global brand recognition that’s on par with Coca-Cola. Others point to her responsiveness to broad social trends — yes, her novel careers and new-fangled accessories, but also new body types and ethnicities. Barbie has even challenged traditional notions of gender.

Still, others credit the low price point at which consumers can hop on the Barbie bandwagon (or Malibu beach cruiser).

There is some truth to all of these explanations. But I believe the real reason runs deeper.

Barbie as a fertility totem

Consider this instead: Barbie is a space-age recasting of a stone-age fertility totem, a symbol of an ancient, enduring matriarchal faith.

True, Barbie, with her cinched-in waist and narrow hips, is hardly a swelling Venus of Willendorf, a type of well-known goddess sculpture made in Europe almost 25,000 years ago. Yet like that prehistoric Venus, Barbie is a small, portable object. An object that nomadic peoples — or contemporary kids — can grab and cradle and carry in their hands.

There are other similarities, too. I rest much of my argument on Barbie’s itty bitty arched feet. Like Barbie, Neolithic goddess figures did not have feet; their legs tapered to prongs. To stand up, they were plunged into the earth, linking them to the Great Mother, Mother Earth, the chthonian (dark/underworld) source of their power.

Nor did all goddess figures have waistlines as wide as they were tall. Barbie, for instance, closely resembles the Cycladic idols — broad-shouldered, streamlined female figures with slender hips that were made in the Cyclades between 3000-2200 BCE, and that are believed to have functioned as objects of veneration.

Replica of Venus of Willendorf.

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Cycladic figurine replica, representative of the Cycladic civilization that developed from about 3200 - 2000 BC , in the group of Cyclades islands.

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If Barbie can be seen as a modern emblem of an ancient goddess faith, much about her starts to make sense. After all, in 1959, Barbie came first, two years before Ken, in the same way that the ancient goddess religions antedated Judeo-Christian patriarchal monotheism. Nor should it be a surprise that Barbie lives in a paradise of consumer goods; there is no garden — no Eden — from which a patriarchal God could exile her.

Likewise, with this perspective, Ken’s second-class status and genital abridgment make sense: he is a eunuch priest in a goddess cult. Per the tagline of Gerwig’s movie: “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”

Barbie’s origin story

In The Barbie Tapes, a podcast I co-host with Antonia Cereijido, we delve into the origins of the Barbie we know today, the one who rates a major Hollywood film some 60 years into her time in the spotlight.

The beginning of that global fame was sparked when Ruth Handler, who was one of the co-founders of Mattel, saw a German doll known as Lilli on vacation in the late '50s.

As pieces of sculpture, the Barbie doll and the Lilli doll are almost indistinguishable. But they have very different invented personalities.

An advertisement published in the author's 2004 book "Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll."

Lilli was based on a comic character in the Bild-Zeitung, kind of a downscale German tabloid newspaper, like The National Enquirer. In the single-panel comics, Lilli is essentially always seen taking money from jowly fat cats for sexual favors.

The emblematic cartoon, is one of Lilli completely naked, holding up a newspaper — a tabloid — to cover her naked body. She's in the apartment of a female friend and she says to the friend something along the lines of “We had a fight, and he took back all his presents.”

That gives you a sense of how Lilli operated in the world.

Handler brings back the doll and shares it with Jack Ryan, a Yale-educated engineer who worked on the Sparrow and Hawk missiles and whom Mattel had hired to do engineering work. He takes it to Japan, where he assists other members of Mattel’s design team in finding someone to make a copy of it

Ultimately those invented personalities — Barbie versus Lilli — were very different, but, you know, a woman in the 1950s had to be the wholesome milkshake-drinking girl next door and — I search for euphemisms — also have the body of a German sex worker.

Barbie as goddess

Greta Gerwig poses on the pink carpet upon arrival for the European premiere of "Barbie" in London on July 12.

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Gerwig, in fact, seems to have homed in on the goddess aspect of Barbie’s identity. In the film, Barbie leaves her idyllic Olympian toy world for the terrestrial one inhabited by humans. This is a familiar trope in mythology. Consider the mess the Greek goddess Athena made meddling in human affairs, not the least of which was causing the Trojan war. (Because Barbie has no navel, she reminds me of Athena. Neither were of women born.)

The hero’s journey of discovery is also a trope in fairy tales. In "The Little Mermaid," Ariel cuts a deal with a treacherous witch to incarnate as a person. She swaps her fish tail for legs and relinquishes her voice — an unfortunate exchange that imperils the very transformation she seeks.

I realize there is a tongue-in-cheek, ivory-tower quality to the idea of Barbie as an ancient feminine archetype. Yet Barbie's first marketers, an unabashedly cynical bunch, relied heavily on the idea of unconscious motivations — and pervasive archetypes — to construct their advertising campaigns.

What a Freudian psychoanalyst had to do with Barbie’s success

Ernest Dichter, a real Viennese Freudian psychoanalyst, revolutionized U.S. marketing in the 1950s and 60s. He analyzed consumers' deep-seated fears and needs, then exploited those fears and needs to sell products. In Getting Motivated, his 1979 memoir, Dichter admitted that in marketing, his “knowledge of mythology came in handy.”

The first sales strategy for Barbie came out of the focus-group research Mattel had commissioned from, yes, Dichter himself.

Not only could Dichter identify people’s unconscious drives, he also saw the ugly social order as it was, not as people may have wanted it to be. His crafty strategy to sell Barbie, however, had less to do with her underlying identity and more to do with the second-class status of real-life women. In the 1950s and 60s, women could not buy property or open a checking account without the sponsorship of a husband or father. This meant that men, in those days, were essentially meal tickets.

During Dichter’s Barbie focus groups, the cunning psychoanalyst saw how dead-set most mothers were against the doll: one referred to her as an over-sexed “daddy doll.” But when a rough tomboy told her mother that Barbie looked “well-groomed,” the mother softened toward the doll.

This, Dichter realized, was a way to position Barbie. Better her daughter should learn to snare a man in a sleazy way than not be able to snare one at all.

What this has to do with the new ‘Barbie’ film

Over Barbie’s six decades of doll dominance, she’s inhabited a toy ecosystem now fully realized on the big screen in Gerwig’s relentlessly marketed film.

Gerwig’s costumes and settings that are often direct quotations from real outfits and playsets that the director herself, age 39, would have encountered in childhood.

Barbie drives the cars, not Ken. Barbie owns the dream houses, not Ken. Barbie is the empowered figure, and Ken, if not literally a eunuch priest, is very much her subordinate.

It is, of course, a fantasy world — and a world that entices viewers through nostalgia. It is also world of exaggeration, of “camp,” a world that is artificial, and defiant in its flirtation with kitsch. Camp is ironic. It presents a world of objects surrounded by air quotes — a world not of lamps but “lamps.”

Viewers will have to determine how well Barbie survives a harsh human world that is still very much controlled by men. I want that archetypal feminine essence to prevail. I hope she emerges as a goddess, not merely a "goddess."

Of course, Ruth Handler once dismissed the goddess idea as "baloney." That said, the designers who crafted the doll did not.

Most were well-schooled in visual art and understood its metaphorical underpinnings. In the 1990s, I asked Aldo Favilli, Mattel's chief of sculpture since 1972 and a former sculpture restorer at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, about the idea of Barbie-as-goddess.

His judicious reply: "I've heard that said."

Listen to our podcast "The Barbie Tapes"

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From prototype to prestige, this episode kicks off the origin story of Barbie as told by her creators in their own words.

The Barbie Tapes: A Toy is Born

From prototype to prestige, this episode kicks off the origin story of Barbie as told by her creators in their own words.

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Listen 32:36

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Ken's creation is a big hit for Barbie fans, but he’s facing a few growing pains of his own. In this episode, we investigate Ken's origin story, delve into the inner workings of Mattel, and hear how Barbie's inventor, Ruth Handler, was ousted from her own company.

The Barbie Tapes: Battle of the Bulge

Ken's creation is a big hit for Barbie fans, but he’s facing a few growing pains of his own. In this episode, we investigate Ken's origin story, delve into the inner workings of Mattel, and hear how Barbie's inventor, Ruth Handler, was ousted from her own company.

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Listen 32:24

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A new Mattel team, led by a man who feared the volatility of the toy business, diversified the company and made a big gamble on electronics. It didn’t work. Fortunately, Barbie ends up in the sure hands of some trailblazing women executives. From the workforce to the workout, Barbie was a doll of her times.

The Barbie Tapes: When Girls — and Barbie — Could Do Anything

A new Mattel team, led by a man who feared the volatility of the toy business, diversified the company and made a big gamble on electronics. It didn’t work. Fortunately, Barbie ends up in the sure hands of some trailblazing women executives. From the workforce to the workout, Barbie was a doll of her times.

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A hazardous materials team will begin working Monday to remove neutralized methyl methacrylate from two of three tanks at the GKN aerospace facility in Garden Grove.

Some 50,000 Orange County residents were evacuated for several days last month after one of the tanks overheated on May 21, causing fears of an explosion or a leak through the Memorial Day weekend.

The clean-up will be done in phases, until Thursday, “with multiple layers of safety protocols and oversight measures in place,” according to a press release from the Orange County Health Care Agency.

Containers that support temperature control and secure transportation will be used in the operation.

Cleanup was initially scheduled to begin June 4, but was postponed after officials said "needed resources" were unavailable.

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer launched an investigation into the incident last month. The FBI and Environmental Protection Agency also seized evidence at the facility earlier this month.

Methyl methacrylate produces a fruit-like odor, Orange County Health Care Agency said residents may notice the scent during the operation. The agency said levels will remain below thresholds that could pose health risks.

Officials say environmental protection will be in place throughout the week. Air will be continuously monitored through both mobile and fixed equipment at the fence line of the facility and in the community. Air and odor monitoring based on wind conditions will also be done. Work will occur only during the daylight hours until Thursday.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is restricting access to rehabilitative programming for incarcerated people as it clamps down on overtime spending before the end of its financial year.

Hundreds of rehabilitative programs operate throughout California prisons, including restorative justice, violence prevention, higher education, creative arts expression and entrepreneurial training.

The rollback began earlier this month and will end June 30, according to documents obtained by CalMatters. Corrections spokesperson Terri Hardy described the limitations as a “cost-saving measure.” The department did not respond to a detailed list of questions, including which prisons and programs have been affected.

The department’s overall budget has remained about flat since 2022, around $18 billion a year despite recent cuts that include five prison closures.

Lawmakers at budget hearings earlier this year pressed Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber to tighten spending as the department asked for additional $91 million in ongoing funding to cover unbudgeted personnel costs. The department last month also proposed an additional $100 million in workers compensation.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union that represents state prison guards, did not respond to CalMatters’ requests for an interview.

Tony Tafoya, who’s been incarcerated since 2012, said he’s never seen anything like this happen before. Tafoya said the scale-back has had the biggest impact on college classes. He’s currently enrolled in Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin but said his math class has missed out on 12 days of instruction.

“I feel like I’m falling behind,” he said. “There’s a lot of healing that comes from going to school. It provides humanity. It makes me feel like I’m actually seen as a person. I feel like that’s what’s being missed out on.”

Programs at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga have also been interrupted, including a civic education pilot program. The program, run by the organization Initiate Justice, includes just over a dozen incarcerated people who helped draft legislation to improve social emotional learning in the K-12 school system. Assembly Bill 1851, authored by Democratic Assemblymember Mike Gipson from Gardena, is sailing through the Legislature and scheduled for an upcoming education committee hearing Wednesday.

Antoinette Ratcliffe, executive director of Initiate Justice, said the group “thrives off of active and live discussion, off of meaningful exploration.” The severing of that connection disrupts the learning experience and practical application of the programming, she said.

“We have made it a goal across the Legislature to make rehabilitative programming a priority, so to continue to see disruptions like this feels counter to what we agreed upon as a state,” she said. “It feels like a let down.”

Other advocates have echoed those sentiments. Danica Rodarmel, a criminal justice reform lobbyist, said any disruption in people’s ability to access programming impacts their mental health and well being. The completion of a program or certificate, she said, is often a determining factor in people’s ability to be granted parole.

“Limiting people’s ability to engage in pro-social activities is contradictory to the goals of maintaining safe prisons both for the people who are incarcerated but also for the people who work there,” she said.

It's tick season, possibly the worst in a decade.

More and more Americans are being exposed to these parasites as climate change expands the range where they can survive. That means more people are also exposed to the bevy of health conditions they can cause, such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the alpha-gal-triggered red meat allergy and, most common of all, Lyme disease.

For Lyme disease, there may be some additional protection on the horizon. Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Valneva announced this spring that they plan to seek regulatory approval for a vaccine to protect against Lyme disease. A previous vaccine for Lyme became available in the late 1990s but was pulled only three years later due to lawsuits, public fear of side effects and a lack of interest.

It's unclear whether this latest stab at a Lyme disease vaccine will get a warmer reception if it's approved, especially in the post-COVID era of vaccine skepticism.

For a sense of how it might go over with rural populations at high risk of Lyme, KFF Health News spoke with a group of hunters.

Few people spend more time in the woods exposed to ticks. At the same time, as a collective, hunters  skew conservative, rural and male, according to a survey from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. And these are identities associated with increased hesitancy about or resistance to vaccines, according to Ashley Kirzinger, associate director for Public Opinion and Survey Research at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

Targets for ticks

Left untreated, Lyme can cause a variety of symptoms, from fevers, chills and headaches to arthritis, shooting pains and inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 476,000 people in the U.S. may be diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year, the CDC says. That's at least in part because the range of places where cases have been reported has "expanded significantly" since 1995.

So would hunters get the Lyme vaccine if it became available?

"Given my proclivity for the outdoors, absolutely," said Jess Manganelli, one of seven hunters (and one hiker) who spoke with KFF Health News on a recent Saturday at the Busch Shooting Range in Weldon Spring, Mo., just outside of St. Louis.

Of the eight, Manganelli, who had been hunting turkeys the weekend before, was the most positive about the vaccine. Six others said they would consider it but would want more information about its safety and effectiveness, as well as their risk for contracting the disease.

But Manganelli was the only one who believed she may have previously contracted Lyme disease, although she was never formally diagnosed with it. Two years ago, she experienced muscle weakness, tiredness, fatigue, swelling and headaches after a tick bite, but when she went to urgent care, she was told they didn't test for Lyme.

Nearly all the hunters knew someone who had had Lyme disease — an old roommate, a family member, friends, a former student. Lyme can be difficult to diagnose and to treat and is often misdiagnosed at first. Many of the hunters witnessed their acquaintances navigating those challenges and struggling with sometimes debilitating symptoms.

An illness with lingering effects

That familiarity among the hunters in Missouri was unsurprising to author and conservationist Steven Rinella, host of the hunting show MeatEater.

"I'm a turkey hunter. In talking about turkey hunting, you talk about ticks as much as you talk about turkeys," Rinella said. "Just the nature of turkey hunting puts you into exposure. You're sitting for long periods of time, trying to use vegetation for concealment."

In fact, both Rinella and his older son contracted Lyme disease 13 years ago during a bluegill fishing trip in the Hudson Valley in New York. His son developed Bell's palsy, a sudden paralysis on one side of the face, but recovered quickly after a course of oral antibiotics. Steven Rinella's symptoms, on the other hand, lingered for months, leaving him unable to walk down stairs without a handrail or to ride a bike. He ended up receiving intravenous antibiotic treatments for a month.

"I thought my life had changed," Rinella said, "but I recovered, as far as I know."

That experience is one reason Rinella said he would absolutely consider getting a Lyme vaccine if it proved safe and provided considerable protection against the disease. Unlike with some other diseases, prior infection does not provide permanent immunity, so a person who has had Lyme could still benefit from a vaccine.

Knowledge of similar challenges influenced the thinking of the hunters in Missouri as well.

Jeremy Hollingshead said he may be less inclined to take a vaccine owing to his former roommate's experience with Lyme disease, which is not to say the experience was pleasant. In fact, Hollingshead said he thinks his old pal is still dealing with lingering effects of it 10 years later. But Hollingshead has spent his whole life in the woods, and of hundreds of people he knows who have done the same, he knows of only one of them contracting Lyme.

"I know it was a bad outcome for him," Hollingshead said, but he thinks the odds of getting Lyme himself seem pretty slim.

Meanwhile, Julian Barnes said seeing a relative struggle with Lyme makes him more open to a potential vaccine. It took a long time for doctors to come to that diagnosis, and finding a good treatment has been equally difficult.

"I would say I am vaccine-hesitant, generally speaking," Barnes said. "But Lyme, I've seen the way it affects people in my life. ... I would definitely have to really understand the vaccine, how it works."

An unclear path for a new vaccine

The new, four-dose vaccine candidate technically missed one of the bars set out in trials because not enough participants contracted Lyme. Still, the companies say it's about 75% effective in reducing cases, and they plan to submit it to regulators for approval. A Pfizer spokesperson said there were no updates on their regulatory efforts when contacted by KFF Health News in June.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a noted anti-vaccine activist before taking over as head the agency that oversees vaccine approvals, and he's remade it in ways that have prompted some vaccine makers to pull back on development.

But he's also been an advocate on Lyme disease. In May, he announced an initiative to combat Lyme disease. And during his Senate confirmation hearings, he said his family had been deeply affected by Lyme disease and that nobody would work harder than he would to find a vaccine or treatment.

If the vaccine is ultimately approved by the FDA, an endorsement from Kennedy would go a long way, according to KFF's Kirzinger, particularly among supporters of his Make America Healthy Again movement, who tend to be more vaccine-skeptical.

"They trust him as much as they trust their own doctors to tell them what to do with their health and for health information," Kirzinger said. "If he comes out as a strong proponent of this vaccine and says, 'Look what my administration did, and we made this available,' I would imagine there would be less vaccine resistance among that group."

Only one of the hunters who spoke with KFF Health News said they definitely would not be interested in a Lyme vaccine if it became available.

"I kind of hand it off to God and the body he gave me. I'm pretty durable," JP Cummings said. But even though he's not interested in it for himself, he's curious to see what his fellow hunters do as more information comes out.

"Hunters care about the wildlife; hunters care about health," Cummings said. "They love the wildlife, they love their deer, and they love their fellow hunters."

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF.

Far more people than previously known have dropped Affordable Care Act health insurance for 2026, according to data released Friday.

Five million fewer people are currently enrolled in ACA marketplace plans compared to the record high reached last year. More than 1 million fewer people picked a plan for 2026, and then 4 million more either disenrolled or failed to pay their premiums and, therefore, dropped coverage.

Prices in the market skyrocketed after President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress failed to extend extra financial help for enrollees last year. The Department of Health and Human Services published a report about the data on its website Friday.

The report says 19.2 million people are currently enrolled in ACA insurance now.

At its high, 24.2 million people were in the ACA marketplace in 2025, according to government figures.

The steep drop in enrollment reflects what insurers, administrators and other health policy experts expected earlier this year. After initial sign ups were lower than last year, they predicted the picture would get worse as time went on and people found they could not afford to pay their premiums.

"The main takeaway is that enrollment is down 13% from last year," explains Cynthia Cox, director of KFF's Program on the ACA. "While the Trump administration attributes this drop in enrollment to their attempts to address fraud, this coverage loss happened at the same time millions of people faced double- or even triple-digit increases in their premium payments with the expiration of enhanced tax credits."

The idea that the growth in enrollment was due to massive fraud is a theory advanced by the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank influential in the Trump administration.

Many health policy experts are skeptical. They say the increase in enrollment during the pandemic is not suspicious. It was a predictable consequence of Congress's investment of billions of federal dollars in making premiums more affordable — the enhanced premium tax credits.

"The marketplace doubled in size during the period when there were enhanced subsidies because the coverage was much more affordable and much more appealing to people," Cox says.

This year's drop in enrollment is also predictable, given that premium costs doubled, on average, from 2025 to 2026. The costs went up after Republican lawmakers let the enhanced premium tax credits expire; Democrats shut down the government in October 2025 trying to negotiate an extension of the credits that would have kept prices low.

"When their costs went up, many of them dropped their coverage," Cox says.

She adds that while fraud is a real problem in the ACA marketplaces, as it is in all insurance markets, she thinks it does not account for all of the drop in enrollment.

Stacey Pogue, senior research fellow at the Georgetown Center on Health Insurance Reforms, agrees.

"I don't see data that point to that conclusion that a 5 million-person drop can be explained by allegations of fraud," she says. "There's lots of evidence pointing to people making decisions based on what they can pay each month."

The higher health insurance costs are tough for consumers in an economy still plagued by overall inflation. As congress let the prices go up, people made tough decisions about family budgets, where to work, whom to marry and more.

It's also a problem for insurance companies, several of which have announced they will not be participating in ACA markets next year, including Cigna.

"If there are fewer customers, then that makes the market less appealing to insurance companies," Cox says.

That's especially true because the people dropping their coverage tend to be healthier people. If too many healthy people drop out of the markets, there's a danger that the markets could enter a "death spiral."

Cox says she's not worried about a death spiral at this point.

"I think there are still enough people buying ACA marketplace coverage and that's going to keep these markets working," she says. "At this point, we don't see any parts of the country that are at risk of having no insurance company. If that were to happen, that would be what a death spiral might look like."

Even so, the premiums for these plans are on track to keep rising, which could continue to pummel consumers navigating high health care costs. Enrollment in the marketplaces may continue to shrink too. According to a recent analysis from Pogue at Georgetown, early insurance rate filings for 2027 show that rates will be going up again next year.