There was an article in The New York Times Magazine not long ago about people who collect hyperrealistic "reborn" dolls. Reborning, we're told, "is the name that has emerged for a curious process of altering and enhancing a baby doll to look and even to feel as much like a human baby as possible." People are stockpiling these creations with visible veins and umbilical stumps, with the expectation that the dolls might "fill a void" or "recapture a happy time." They dress them up and "pose them in different ways" and reminisce about their children or those they never had. "Some collectors have whole rooms set aside as a nursery," according to the Times.
This puppetry for ...