By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Jeffrey Conner doesn’t remember exactly how he acquired his first bicycle headbadge during a post-college gig as a bike mechanic in Seattle, but he does know it was an English-made, Rocket-brand badge someone had spray-painted blue. The metal tag had originally adorned the head tube on a bicycle frame, and like other headbadges, it was probably the only surviving part from an older bike that had been mistreated or left out in the elements to decay. "Even small towns had their own bicycle...

Dissecting the Dream of the 1890s: My Skype Date With Those Curious Neo-Victorians

By Lisa Hix — When Vox published Sarah A. Chrisman’s essay in September, “I love the Victorian era. So I decided to live in it,” it sparked an Internet furor. In the piece—a tease for her new book, , which came out in early November—Chrisman extols the virtues of switching over to clothing and technology from the 1880s and 1890s, as she and her husband, Gabriel, have. Sarah originally wrote the book, her third, in script with a fountain pen. "Yes, the Victorian era was terrible because of this and...

The Hippie Daredevils Who Were Just Crazy Enough to Invent Mountain Biking

By Ben Marks — On October 21, 1976, a small group of cyclists and a dog named Junior gathered on Carson Ridge, which rises just west of Fairfax, California. It was mid-morning and the sky was bright blue, a beautiful day for racing 50-pound vintage Schwinn Excelsior clunkers down Cascade Canyon Road, whose winding dirt surface plunges 1,300 feet in less than two miles, past serpentine outcrops, low-lying chaparral, and scattered oaks on its way to the confluence of San Anselmo and Cascade creeks. "No...

Murder Machines: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — There's an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you're sober, chances are you'll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter. Over the past hundred years, as automobiles have been woven into the fabric of our daily lives, our legal system has undermined public safety, and we’ve been collectively trained to think of these deaths as unavoidable “accidents” or acts of God. Today, despite the efforts of major public-health agencies and...

A Bumpy Bike Ride to Equal Rights

By Lisa Hix — File this under: We had no idea. We just learned that the invention and widespread popularity of bicycles at the turn of the century played a big part in the liberation of women. Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova alerted us to a new National Geographic book called "Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom," which explores how bikes allowed young women to socialize unchaperoned—and led to changes in fashion that released them from the restrictive Victorian corsets and...

American Picker Dream, Part I: Mike Wolfe On His Love Affair With Bikes

By Ben Marks — I was walking to school one day and saw all these bikes in the garbage. I was just amazed because I didn't have one and I found it incredible that anyone was throwing them out. So I gathered up as many as I could and put them all in our garage. They were mostly banana-seat bikes from the '60s, maybe one was a Schwinn. There was a girl’s balloon-tire bike, too. That was the first bike I learned to ride because there was no bar in the middle—I was little, so I would ride it almost right above...

Riding the Classics, from Chevys to Schwinns

By Maribeth Keane — I’ve been around Chevy cars my whole life and had them when I was in high school. It’s a lifetime thing. Some people do Fords; others Chryslers. It can be as easy as what your first car was. My first was a ‘59 Chevy El Camino. Actually, I’m a General Motors person. I have also a Cadillac, but mostly Chevrolets. It’s not a particular model I’m interested in. Louis Chevrolet was a French guy, a racer. General Motors bought his company, around 1910. Chevrolet became General Motors’...