I was an ambidextrous child, and the symmetry of roller skating was a welcome respite from my awkwardness with physical activities that involved a ball or a racket.
Some communities are formed through schools, churches, workplaces. But much of how we learn about one another as a society comes from physically being together in places like skating rinks.
Social media has created a digital latticework, but it has also, for some, created abusive commenters, silos, and validation rather than curiosity.
I've often wondered if the trade-off for growing up in the relative newness and freshness of the West Coast was befuddlement when it comes to historical preservation. We don't have many old things, and we don't really know what to do with the few that are around when our default response is to compost or field burn.
Because sports are a religion, it's difficult to imagine a world without the Olympics, and to be sure, they have given us many glorious moments.
Many of my 20- and 30-something peers struggle with student loan debt and high rent, and more than once, I've erupted in laughter at the idea that I will collect any Social Security in my Betty White years.
Money can be a reflection of our perceptions of power, self-esteem, personal history, fears, and happiness.
Some Americans, like those working in government or nonprofits, know the consequences of having their salaries public.
Competing in junior fencing requires lessons, equipment, and travel that may cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, keeping talented athletes from wielding sabers or masks.
Women's marathoning was not added as an Olympic medal event until 1984 due to unfounded and bizarre concerns among Olympic organizers about women's ability to run longer distances. It was finally added after much campaigning.
As a producer, it's not unusual to find yourself on the field, backstage, often with a camera crew and living with constant anxiety of accidentally ending up in the shot.
As it turns out, just hanging out around athletes doesn't actually make one more fit.
The more I think about the Olympics, even from afar, its mere concept stuns me. I can't think of any other line of work where, every four years, people gather to be ranked one, two, and three, then are more or less told to evaporate until the next go-around.
Endnotes, often confused with footnotes that live at the bottom of a page, is that lump of text at the end of the book, sometimes even relegated to a tiny font size. They're often forgotten but, in nonfiction, particularly history books, can offer a fascinating footprint into the author's research, a joyful, geeky abyss.
I'm a realist about who really reads books and who acts like they read books.
It's still thrilling, even if my work is something that people even pretend they're interested in on a first date or at a cocktail party.
Much like film, authors spend a fair amount of time alone in the creative process, tossing their work out into what can feel like an abyss, void of real people.
No one in my family was a journalist, and it didn't seem like a real job. Part of me still doesn't think it is.
I was a fly on the wall at Gawker Media during the heyday of this thing called blogging.
In reporting, you will often be humbled by the courage others have in telling and trusting you with their tale, no two alike.
Sports fandom transcends gender, race, language, political preference, socioeconomic status, or any other way you can think of slicing this planet.
Banning sports is a ludicrous proposition.
Something amazing happens when you tell people you write about sports for a living. You begin to feel like you're in a scene from 'Dawn of the Dead.' The way people change when talking about 'their team' can be nothing short of zombiefication.
When George Hirsch ran the New York City Marathon in 1976, the first year the course snaked through all five boroughs, the event was a lean affair. He and two thousand others dodged wayward bicycles and pedestrians on the streets, with little help from an anemic police presence.
With a smartphone in tow and a playlist humming, a runner may miss the crunch of leaves underfoot, the enthusiastic cheers of benevolent strangers, or even her own breath. And, for many runners, leaving the mobile device at home is the most liberating part of the sport.
In the modern road-running era, digital photography has intersected with weekend-warrior culture, creating a golden age of social-media humblebragging. For some, the marathon course is sacred ground. For others, it's a personal movie set.
There are good reasons for not wanting to host the Olympics. The Games can be costly and, in spite of their patriotic overtones, can unintentionally expose a nation's weaknesses to the world.
For professional athletes, the motives for cheating generally are more obvious: money, fame, and often a low likelihood of being caught. But why would a middle- or back-of-the-pack runner lie or cheat in a race that doesn't even matter?
Long before social media made things like bib replication easier, banditing at major races was viewed as a brave act. Rebellious runners like John Tarrant gatecrashed races as a political statement, in protest of rules about amateurism that limited how much money athletes could earn in appearance fees and endorsements.
Most major races, including the New York City Marathon, require runners to provide photo identification when picking up a bib. Most provide bibs only a few days before the race, shortening the window in which someone could copy a bib.
Sports like sailing, rowing, and bobsled have long vexed spectators and television producers.
VR could, in theory, connect sports fans in different geographical locations so they could watch a game together. Instead of a group text or Twitter stream of commentary playing out across time zones when a team is playing, our avatars could inhabit virtual stands, side by side with the rest of our digital tribe.
My parents wielded disposal cameras and Polaroids with the best of them, occasionally begging for at least one decent photo of my brother and me at the state fair, in front of the Golden Gate bridge, or smiling half-heartedly next to a mascot.
Even as Instagram defines our visual moment, we use the app's filters to travel backwards in time, to make our images resemble the Polaroids of yore by casting them literally in a different, more nostalgic light.
The phenomena of taking photos and sharing them isn't new, but with Instagram being mobile, both have become cheaper and faster, producing the instant gratification of knowing how our shots look in our palms.
As a journalist and longtime photographer, I love Instagram and the connection it gives me to my friends and family as I journey afar or for me to view their lives from my perch back home.
As the 19th century teetered into the 20th, the clank of typewriter keys went from solo to symphony. They were the weapon of choice for professional writers, the business elite, people with things to say and the need to say them quickly.
Using a typewriter, at times, feels more like playing piano than jotting down notes, a percussive exercise in expressing thought that is both tortuous and rewarding.
Generations of thinkers have made typewriters their frenemies, and long before there were Gmail inboxes, print correspondence stacked up, some hastily written and impulsive on the steel gadgets.
Trucking is the backbone of U.S. commerce. Consumers rely on the industry to move the parts for their cars, the food for their dinner tables, and, increasingly, the goods they order online.
To drive a semi-truck, a driver needs a commercial driver's license. While formal training isn't required, most drivers enroll in a program to help prepare them for the written and practical exams in their states.
While the U.S. government is unlikely to ever limit the number of football games, plenty of parents are refusing to let their children play the sport due to the risk of head injuries.
Increasingly, football fans are arguing that the game is bloated with too much down time. The officiating is clumsy.
Football, like boxing, will never go away, just occupy a different role in the American zeitgeist.
So who or what is to blame for baseball games that go on forever? Two oft-cited culprits are constant replay calls and batters who leave the box in between every pitch to adjust their gloves and helmet and shin guards and elbow pads and then knock the dirt off their cleats before working up their stride for the next at-bat.
London, Ontario, sits halfway between Detroit and Buffalo, a description that applies as much to its soul as to its geographical coordinates.
Precisely at the moment when an athletic career is most on the line and fan perceptions of a Herculean, supra-human performance are highest, an athlete's brain may be at its most vulnerable.
By the middle of the century, retirement culture - exemplified by timeshares in Florida, the golf industry, and AARP membership - was booming. Americans, it turned out, were pretty good at figuring out how not to do anything in their twilight years.