You ou can learn a lot about what's trending by reading T-shirts. A few months ago, I saw someone on the subway whose chest announced, "My other car is an eBike."The tee was onto something: e-bikes are the top-selling electric vehicle in the United States. In 2020, Americans bought more than twice as many e-bikes as they did electric cars (score: an estimated 500,000 to 231,000).
In China, e-bikes outnumber all cars, e- and not e-, Edward Benjamin, the chairman of the Light Electric Vehicle Association, told me over the phone from his house in Fort Myers, Florida.
He went on, "Can Americans change from a four-wheel culture to a two-wheel culture in the next century? I say absolutely! There ain't enough roadway, there ain't enough materials to build cars, there ain't enough wealth to sustain the car culture." As someone who is not an influencer but an influencee, I have had an urge lately to strap on a helmet, join the traffic, and e-go with the flow. "When the pandemic came, that pretty much ripped the cover off of the e-bike business," Shane Hall, a senior buyer for Bicycles NYC, told me one afternoon at the company's Upper East Side operation, which was crammed with bicycles and accessories.
This story is from the January 02 - 09, 2023 (Double Issue) edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the January 02 - 09, 2023 (Double Issue) edition of The New Yorker.
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NO WAY BACK
The resurgence, in the past decade, of Paul Schrader as one of the most accomplished and acclaimed contemporary movie directors is part of a bigger trend: the self-reinvention of Hollywood auteurs as independent filmmakers.
PRIMORDIAL SORROW
\"All Life Long,\" the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: \"The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,/ All life long crying without avail,/As the water all night long is crying to me.\"
CHOPPED AND STEWED
The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa.
TOUCH WOOD
What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry's book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages.
HELLO, HEARTBREAK
Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era.
ENEMY OF THE STATE
Javier Milei's plan to remake Argentina begins with waging war on the government.
THE CHOOSING ONES
The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband.
OBSCURE FAMILIAL RELATIONS, EXPLAINED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Children who share only one parent are half siblings. Children who have been bisected via a tragic logging accident are also half siblings, but in a different way.
NOTE TO SELVES
The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.
BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
