the provenance of independent toy stores
経済格差がおもちゃ屋の陳列棚にも及んでいるという話です。NYTらしい知的な文体で、加えておもちゃの名前や米国で生活していないとわからないことばがちりばめられています。例えば、they are the provenance of independent toy storesなんて、ぱっと見ではわからいのでは？ ぜひ原文に挑戦してみてください。（UG）
The Great Divide, Now in the Toy Aisle
Earlier this year, at the 109th Annual American International Toy Fair, held at the Javits Convention Center as one of the culture’s most convincing cases for childlessness, a former investment banker named Jill Todd displayed “The Tuneables,” an interactive DVD series she had created through her company, the Music Intelligence Project. The daughter of two musicologists, Ms. Todd developed the project in conjunction with her parents as an instructional system in melody, rhythm and tone — the fundamentals of music leveraged as a means to enhance cognitive function. Nearby, but easily obscured by the acres of primary-color plastic, was a booth for a company called Fat Brain Toys, whose games and puzzles in logic and sequencing came with an impressive lineage, some of them designed by the celebrated inventor Ivan Moscovich, a Holocaust survivor.
Walking into one of the three branches of Toys “R” Us now in the Bronx, you would find nothing from either of these ventures. Just as we are unlikely to unearth dilled artisanal long beans from the farms of northern Vermont, we are unlikely to find these sorts of diversions — small-batch toys aimed at the parent for whom it is never too early to begin LSAT drills — in large retail chains. Instead, they are the provenance of independent toy stores that maintain a presence almost exclusively in the city’s most affluent neighborhoods.
In the 1970s, the receipt of a Fisher Price farm set on Christmas Day would have conferred nothing terribly distinctive about class, having come from a department store and having appeared just as probably under the tree of a white-shoe lawyer as it would have under the tree of a brick layer. But toys, like lettuces or chocolate, have long since become another manifestation of difference. (And this is even before we arrive at an absurdity like the $1,499.99 Etch-a-Sketch encased in Swarovski crystals, currently at F. A. O. Schwarz, something that would appear to have been created as an engagement offering for an 8-year-old Trump to give a 6 ½-year-old Kardashian.)
