Welcome to 2023! In case you’re just joining us, everything’s bad now. Whether or not you buy into the notion that there’s such a thing as "cancel culture," there’s no denying all sorts of stuff we once thought was wholesome is now considered dangerous and evil. When I was a kid, meat was supposed to make you big and strong; now it’s destroying the planet and you’re supposed to eat crickets . And forget about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches-send your kid to school with one of those today and you’re likely to send half the class into anaphylaxis.
Another formerly wholesome idea that’s taken a big hit these days is suburban living. For at least a century, having your own home on a modest plot of land was a perfectly reasonable aspiration. Kids playing in the yard, a barbecue grill, watering the begonias, changing your motor oil in the driveway. These things once smacked of the good life. Now, they’re synonymous with vapidity, intellectual stultification, homogeneity, sub-optimal land use, sprawl, car dependence, and of course climate change-unless you’re grilling cricket burgers. I know this because people are constantly saying it on Twitter. Bikes and bike advocacy are very much a part of this suburban antipathy, too: cities are good because they’re bike-friendly, whereas ‘burb are bad because they’re car-centric.
I’m not particularly interested in living in the suburbs; I live in New York City, and I’ll most likely die in it-possibly as soon as tomorrow when a driver takes me […]
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