Category: Thoughts

Essays, philosophizing, reflecting, theorizing, wondering, wandering, ruminating, percolating, etc.

The Art of Quotidian Observation

JPPartland

Socrates is alleged to have declared, “ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ” Or, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” At first, the declaration seems pedantic. That the only way to live is by […]

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Why Jeff Bezos Really Really Needs His Amazon Billions

JPPartland

He wants to go to space. It’s not a joke. The world’s wealthiest person is putting his money into space exploration. Bezos puts about one billion dollars of his Amazon stock a year into it. […]

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Screw Marie Kondo

JPPartland

Minimalism is for rich people. I love the idea of having a living space with less stuff in it. It seems like it might be easier to think and relax in places where you don’t […]

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Clear Lenses for City Riding

JPPartland

When I was in high school, a teacher commented that he thought there’d be fewer car crashes if there were no windshields on cars. At least that’s how I remember it. I believe the reasoning […]

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Drivers Know What You Think.

JPPartland
cover image for story

They don’t. WNYC, New York City’s leading public radio station, recently started a series called “We The Commuters.” It looks at how people get around town. Cycling, not surprisingly, is a topic. On the one […]

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Too Much Damn Parking

JPPartland

The headline on the Commercial Appeal was a great way to start my trip to Memphis. “Parking study finds too many spaces Downtown, still thousands more to be added.” To make it more poignant, I […]

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Fewer Kids Are Riding. Cyclists are worried.

JPPartland

America doesn’t make it easy. A recent finding from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association is making the rounds. Perhaps you’ve read it. Here’s one such statement from The Washington Post “The number of children […]

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The Test That’s Never Graded Until You Fail.

JPPartland
locked bike

Locking a bike up is existential dread. Testing out bike locks and writing about them induced a fair amount of paranoia. What do I know about locks? What if my bikes get stolen? What if […]

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Bad Cyclists Are Irrelevant

JPPartland

You know about the bad cyclist. The one who doesn’t wear a helmet, ignores traffic signals, and flouts the rules of the road. And there’s more. They violate common decency and common sense and just […]

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#commissairedoping is bad for The Amgen Tour of California

JPPartland

It’s a relief that Tejay van Garderen didn’t win the 2019 Tour of California. This isn’t aimed at him, but at the fact that the UCI race commissaires issued a terrible decision on the fourth […]

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