The board of directors of Planet Fitness governs the largest gym chain in the United States. Over nineteen million members. More than 2,500 locations. Ten dollars a month. The most accessible on-ramp to fitness in the country, built for exactly the kind of person who has never felt comfortable in a gym before. Here are…
Category: Ramblings
Living In The Safest Country You’ve Ever Been Afraid Of
In 1960, Rod Serling wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone called The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. The setup is simple. A quiet, tree-lined American street. Then a shadow passes overhead and the power goes out. Cars won’t start. Radios go dead. A boy suggests it might be aliens. What follows is twenty…
Alone in the Midst of the Park
A wealthy town, annoyed by the condition of its neighbor’s side of a shared park, builds a fence down the middle to keep the riffraff out. The residents are furious. At a public meeting, one of them suggests building a second fence around the first fence. Another suggests burning it down. The wealthy town, meanwhile,…
Boycott Everything, All the Time
It feels like every other week there’s a new call to action flooding my social media feeds. Boycott this company. Don’t shop there on Saturday. Pull your money out of that bank. The targets change constantly, sometimes it’s a fast food chain, sometimes it’s a streaming service, sometimes it’s an entire retail category, but the…
Forty Days Without Headlines: Reclaiming My Mind for Lent and Breaking Free from the Outrage Machine
This Lent, I’m giving up something that might seem essential in our hyperconnected world: the news. Not social media entirely (though I’m cutting back), not books, not long-form journalism. Just the daily drip-feed of breaking news, hot takes, and algorithmic anxiety that has controlled my attention for far too long. Morrissey put it perfectly in…
The App Store Is Filling Up With Weekend Projects
I keep seeing the same pattern play out: someone has an idea on a Tuesday, “vibe codes” an app by Thursday, tweets a shiny demo on Friday… and by next month it’s basically digital driftwood. It feels especially loud right now in the MacOS and MacApps subreddits. Every other post is “I built an app…
Priced Out of the Page: Why Your Library Can’t Just Buy Digital Books
I borrow a lot of ebooks from my public library. It feels like magic: tap a button, a book appears, and two weeks later it politely vanishes. No late fees, no driving, no dusty shelves (complimentary, not an insult). But here’s the part I didn’t really understand until I went down the rabbit hole: libraries…