Get Access to Print and Digital for $23.99 per year.
Subscribe for Full Access
The outsized pleasures of the very small

Lori DeBacker drives a Mini Cooper, owns a runt dog, and lives with her husband, a model-train enthusiast, in a twelve-room Victorian house whose tearoom is outfitted with three-quarter-scale furniture. “A woman can sit in it, but a man would never dare,” she told me. “I just like everything tiny. I’ve just liked tiny all my life.” In the second grade, bothered by the unrealistic food offered for Barbies, DeBacker decided to make her own out of clay. Her parents’ country-club friends were impressed and began commissioning meals for their own daughters’ dolls. Today DeBacker, who wears +300 reading…

Subscribe or to continue reading.

’s most recent article for Harper’s Magazine appeared in the August 2015 issue.



More from

| View All Issues |

May 2014

Close
“An unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out amid a homogenized media landscape.” —the New York Times
Subscribe now

Debug