With measles declared eliminated from the US in 2000 and national herd immunity strong, health experts have recommended that American children get two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine—the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and the second between the ages of 4 and 6 years, before they start school.
Before 12 months, vulnerable infants in the US have been protected in part by maternal antibodies early in infancy as well as the immunity of the people surrounding them. But if they travel to a place where population immunity is unreliable, experts recommend that infants ages 6 to 11 months get an early dose—then follow it up with the standard two doses at the standard times, bringing the total to three doses.
The reason they would need three—and the reason experts typically recommend waiting until 12 months—is because the maternal antibodies infants carry can interfere with the vaccine response, preventing the immune system from mounting long-lasting protection. Still, the early dose provides boosted protection in that 6-to-11-month interval.
In the past, this early, extra dose was recommended for infants traveling internationally—to countries that hadn't achieved America's enviable level of herd immunity and were vulnerable to outbreaks. But now, with US vaccination rates slipping, herd immunity becoming spotty, cases rising by the day, and outbreaks simmering in multiple states, the US is no longer different from far-off places that struggle with the extremely infectious virus.
In an article published today in JAMA, prominent health experts—including former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky—call for the US to update its MMR recommendations to include the early, extra dose for infants who are not only traveling abroad, but domestically, to any areas where measles is a concern.
"With some local immunization levels inadequate to avert outbreaks and ongoing disease spread in various regions of the country, a dichotomy between domestic and international travel is not appropriate," the experts write. "For many travel itineraries, there may even be a higher risk of measles exposure at the US point of departure than at the international destinations."
Vaccinating at-risk infants early is critical to their own health—as well as the people around them, the experts note. "[I]nfants younger than one year face a heightened risk of severe measles-related complications such as pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. Younger infants are also at increased risk of developing subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a rare measles complication that has a high fatality rate and may surface years after initial infection," according to the experts.
In addition to Walensky, the author list includes esteemed epidemiologist John Brownstein and computational epidemiologist Benjamin Rader, both experts at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard, as well as infectious disease expert Wesley Rogers at New York University Grossman School of Medicine.
US is now highly vulnerable
Vaccinating travelers, including infants, is critical to preventing measles spread in the US. Since the virus was declared eliminated, most measles importations have been from unvaccinated US residents, who travel abroad and return home with the virus. This is particularly risky when those unvaccinated travelers return home to their unvaccinated communities.
Given the state of the US, domestic travel has become just as risky as international travel, the experts argue. Nationally, the vaccination rate among kindergartners (who should have their two standard MMR doses), fell from a high of 95 percent in 2019—the target to prevent community spread—to 92.7 percent in the 2023–2024 school year. And that figure, while already below target, hides pockets of dismal vaccination rates. A current measles outbreak in West Texas erupted in a county with a vaccination rate of about 82 percent, and some of the county's school systems have rates as low as 46 percent.
"This issue can be compounded by the social and geographic clustering of vaccine hesitancy, which increases the likelihood that an unvaccinated traveler will return to a region with vaccination levels too low to contain onward transmission," the experts emphasize.
In all, it's time for an update, they say. "We therefore propose updating the existing recommendation for an additional early MMR dose to infants aged 6 to 11 months traveling to any region with increased probability of measles exposure, whether international or domestic," they conclude. "Other countries may similarly wish to recommend an early MMR shot for currently unvaccinated infants traveling to locations in the US with measles outbreaks."
Reddit has shown a growing commitment to promoting ads on its platform, especially since going public a year ago. But in the interest of not completely alienating customers with incessant, irrelevant, or personally offensive ads, the social media company is giving users the ability to block advertisers for a year.
In a Reddit post last night, a Reddit employee known as cozy_sheets said that clicking “Hide” on an unwanted ad on Reddit will soon result in Reddit automatically hiding “future ads from that advertiser account for at least a year (you can re-hide the ad after that period of time).” The change will debut on the Reddit website and Reddit’s iOS and Android app throughout “the next several weeks,” according to the announcement.
Reddit didn't detail what limits it will use to ensure that users don't block every single advertiser for an ad-free Reddit. Some users have already reported seeing a daily limit for hiding ads, though.
Reddit's representative said the ad blocks are a response to users wanting “more control over the ads they see.”
The spokesperson noted that users can also “report” an ad if they believe it goes against Reddit’s policies. Reporting an ad also results in that advertiser being blocked from pitching to you for a year.
Reddit already lets people block advertising related to alcohol, dating, gambling, “politics and activism,” “pregnancy and parenting,” "religion and spirituality,” and weight loss. However, some users have complained about this system failing.
Reddit also lets users with accounts in the US and other select countries turn off personalized ads. The company made personalized ads mandatory in some geographies in September 2023.
Despite these ad controls, though, Redditors are likely to see more ads on the platform over the next few years. Reddit executives have pointed to the potential for more ads in comments and a greater focus on contextual ads based on the content around them. All of these ads will be harder for Redditors to avoid than they would have been a few years ago, as a successful war on third-party apps has made it difficult to access Reddit outside of its native apps or website. In 2024, advertising represented 92 percent of Reddit's revenue and grew 60 percent year over year.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
Who doesn’t like car cutaways? Monsters, that’s who. Filthy, depraved monsters. And while we usually think of car cutaways as being the incredible product of a skilled illustrator’s hand, there’s another way to make them: for real. What I mean by this is not drawing a precision, beautifully-rendered cutaway, but actually taking a car and cutting it pretty much in half, then taking pictures! So let’s look at some of those.
Of course, in modern times, these sorts of things would be done with CGI and computers and math and punch cards and all of that sort of thing. But back in the day, these kinds of things took some incredible skill, even beyond the incredible skills needed to do normal car illustrations.
I mean, look at some of these:
They’re incredible! But what do you maybe do if you don’t have access to such an illustrator? Or maybe you want to have many views of a cutaway, or see it in true three dimensions? In that case, carmakers tried a different approach, one that took a very different set of skills, but significant skill nonetheless: just cutting the damn car in half.
Well, it wasn’t always strictly in half, there seem to have been a sort of spectrum of approaches, which I’ll try to show you here. Also, and I’m not really exactly sure why, but this approach seems to have been much more common among European carmakers? I know I’ve seen American cars cut in half as well, but they tended to get used for training schools and things like that more than showing up in ads. I have no idea why.
Anyway, let’s look at some of these. We’ll start with this Fiat 500:
This 500 is sort of the baseline minimum of a physical car cutaway: remove a door/s, cut out any pillars, and if there’s a passenger area with seating, cut away the body there. This is the quickest approach, and is really only used to show the passenger accommodation, not the overall packaging of all a car’s systems.
Also, that lady looks kinda pissed to be stuck in a Fiat 500 with one whole side missing. And the dude sure looks focused on not-driving.
Then there’s a much more comprehensive version, as seen on this pre-’62 Volkswagen Beetle. I think it may be a ’59 or ’60:
Here we have an entire side removed, but the car isn’t exactly halved; seen from the front, I’d think we’d have oh, 75% of the car’s width remaining? For example, note that the bumpers and corner of the rear fender remain intact. So, it’s still mostly there, just peeled open.
VW seemed to like to make these, and would sometimes use them without shoving a colorful family in there first, as you can see in that Type 3 above.
Enough is cut away on these that from a side-on view, you can see the car’s full packaging: where the engine is, the size and location of the luggage compartments, all that. This gives a very clear view of the car’s full packaging.
We can go further, though! This Mini, from about the same era as the VW, is cut pretty much completely in half, right down the middle. You can, of course, see exactly how everything is packaged, and as a bonus, things like the rear seat and even those suitcases in the trunk are cut in half, too, and the drivetrain is very exposed, though the engine/transmission hasn’t been bisected.
But we can go even further!
Now we’re getting even a bit beyond a cutaway and into a cut-off. Here we see a Citroën 2CV, with the body not just cut away, but entirely removed, and replaced with a bent pipe in the shape of the former body’s silhouette. You can definitely see how everything would be packaged here, including the 2CV’s gloriously weird shifter setup, which I once covered here in detail, if you’re curious.
Okay, there’s only one place to go from here:
Just to hell with the body completely! That’s what Renault did in this brochure for the Renault 4, just took the whole damn body off. You get a sense of the packaging this way, but without at least some kind of boundary of the body delineated, it’s a lot less useful.
Like, would that dog actually have enough headroom to perch on those suitcases with the body in place? Maybe?
Also, note the R4 uses a similar hand-through-the-dashboard sort of approach to the shifter as well, like the 2CV.
I’m all for cutaways, though, however they’re done. And if you get a chance to see one of the physical ones in person, oh boy, that’s a treat.
Normally I record the classes I teach. It gives students who miss class a chance to catch up. I also make space in my classes to talk about what is happening in government right now. A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.
It’s a small example of how fear is creeping into American life. The right to say what we want, to choose our topics of study, is essentially American. But we don’t live in America any longer. The truth is, we live in a foreign country now. Our idea of America — the one you grew up with if you were born here, or that drew you to this country if you were an immigrant — and the reality of America today, well, these are different places. We might get back there. But first we have to map the distance between that America and where we are now.
Do I sound alarmist? Yes. Am I exaggerating? Well, lets check where we are.
The President has politicized the Department of Justice and threatens to unleash the power of the federal government on his political enemies. For example, he has promised to punish law firms that provide legal support for his opponents, Now, many are no longer willing to do so.
Organizations fearful of threats from the President preemptively erase ideas, or silence dissenting voices.
The President has suggested that critics are supporters of terrorism, using vague language that allows him to threaten nonprofits, or promise to deport protest leaders, including green card holders.
Words and ideas are banned. Censors rifle their way through government documents and websites to remove them. Federal spaces, like schools on military bases, are purged of books that even mildly hint at the idea that diversity is a good thing. Executive orders that purge these ideas tend to be ambiguous, leading organizations to respond broadly and to self-censor.
Funding of research ideas is being taken away from research experts and handed to political appointees who are defunding the ideas they dislike. Campus officials are trying to decide how to respond to government orders to remove ideas. Environmental groups are being threatened with criminal prosecution for receiving grants from the President’s predecessor.
The President has pardoned militant supporters who engaged in violence to try to reverse the outcome of a previous election, and demoted officials who investigated those supporters.
The President and the richest man in the world routinely make wildly dishonest claims about the government they are running. Critics of the employees of the richest man in the world can expect to be threatened with prosecution from the federal government. The richest man in the world purges ideas or even methods of disseminating ideas from the platform he owns. Qualified and credible voices who know the inner workings of are afraid to publicly expose his failures. They are threatened with firing if they explain to the public about the damage being done, or fired even when its their job to do so.
Elected officials are not exempt from such threats. The President’s opponents face threat of investigation, while even his supporters fear to disagree with him. They also fear criticizing the richest man in the world, even though his actions in destroying much of the government are widely unpopular.
The work of the richest man in the world is exempted from open records laws. We really don’t know what he is doing, and members of Congress refuse to ask him in public. And the employees charged with responding to open records requests are being fired in some agencies.
Public employees are illegally purged if they are viewed as disloyal to the new regime. This includes top-ranking officers in the military, and the lawyers in government who set the boundaries for what a President can do. Within a few weeks, this has started to seem normal, and inevitable. The media coverage often fails to mention how the President is acting illegally.
Some of those are purged because of their gender identity, or because they are associated with ideas now deemed unfashionable, or even for going to a meeting where those ideas are discussed. The government has created tip lines to help identify the disfavored.
Individual journalists whose job it is to hold the President accountable know that they will face a torrent of abuse if they are critical. The richest man in the world might call for a journalist to be fired, falsely accuse media organizations of secretly being paid by shadowy pro-government forces, or sue them to drain resources. Their organization may be banned from press events if it is deemed insufficiently supportive of the President, replaced by partisan outlets who only provide uncritical propaganda.
Some media companies find excuses to bribe the President on the flimsiest of pretexts, humoring his demands for massive financial compensation when faced with normal journalistic practice, because their corporate owners fear the President’s retribution. Corporations have become accustomed to making multi-million contributions to the President as a form of protection money for their businesses.
The judges who provide the last, best hope of constraining the President and the richest man in the world face a historic wave of threats. Judges in the DC area had pizzas mailed anonymously to their homes, to communicate that their address is known to potential attackers.
More and more people are turning to secure private apps to communicate, reflecting worries about state surveillance.
It’s hard to read that list, isn’t it?
Normally, we treat each bullet point as a separate story. But they are all connected. We are witnessing an extraordinarily broad chilling effect in American society. It is not just what you want to say, but what you are allowed to ask. It is about both formal government actions and informal threats, with threats of professional ruin or even violence from the President’s supporters. It is about both censorship and self-censorship. It is about a sense of collective fear.
Read that list again. And ask yourself, what country does it describe? The America you thought you knew is gone, its undoing germinating for years, and culminating in a matter of weeks.
These chilling effects run into every aspect of American life. Right now they seem centered on silencing both bad policies and the authoritarian turn in government.
Our government is simply less accountable when qualified and credible people are afraid to ask questions, or share information. It is also more poorly run. Many in DOGE don’t know the basics of government — how its systems work, and what laws mean — and they won’t know until they are made to hear about it.
Meanwhile Congress flatly refuses to provide any oversight of DOGE. When Dems tried to subpoena Elon Musk, they were voted down. There is even a DOGE subcommittee that has not not dared to bring anyone from DOGE to speak under oath.
Governments where capable bureaucrats are fired, or reassigned if they offer uncongenial truths, will not relay accurate information to decisionmakers, and so, decisions will get worse. We are living through a moment where in some policy domains, right wing social media posters exert more influence on decisions than people who actually know how those policies work.
It is hard to recall such conformity within a party. Republicans are canceling town hall meetings rather than criticize Musk publicly, after Musk has made clear he will not just attack them, but also fund opponents. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic member of Congress said of his Republican peers:
I’m friends with a lot of these guys, and I had wrongly assumed that what was holding them back from speaking out against Trump was they were afraid of losing their jobs. But what they’re afraid of is their own personal security. They tell me that their wives tell them, ‘Don’t contribute to us getting harassed at church or at the grocery store or at the club.’
Free speech hypocrites
For the past decade or so, you were told that America faced a crisis of free speech, characterized by wokeness. Some compared the atmosphere to Maoist China, so great were the chilling effects. Now, as we move into a period where the government is crushing the speech of those it disagrees with, or purging ideas (or the people who represent those ideas) it dislikes, those claims look not just naive, but reckless, since they were used to justify the real chilling effects exist. Anti-wokeness is a handy justification for censorship, as it turns out. It is the means by which the censor can say: “I've stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”
There are obvious hypocrisies and failures. The plan to use terror as a means of governing was clear for a while and it was employed by Trump even when he was out of office. And yet, it was not conveyed with the same vigor as the threat of wokeness. Both the right-wing and much of elite media portrayed wokeness as an existential threat, especially on their opinion pages. They might caveat that Trump was an unprincipled threat to speech, but their focus was on threats from the left. This was a basic fail, and one which should fundamentally discredit those that made it.
How will the anti-wokeness critics respond to our new reality? Some might move on, or adjust their writings. For example, it seems silly to write an op-ed fulminating that some employees at a university proposed an unofficial list of words it wants people to avoid using when the federal government is formally purging a much longer list of words.
Many of those who portrayed themselves as free speech champions or classical liberals are on board with censorship and purges, and will have no difficulty dismissing the charge of hypocrisy, because they never really believed in free speech ideals. They have redefined free speech to be the speech they support, and other speech to be subject to government control.
For example, Niall Ferguson was recently featured on 60 Minutes touting the need for his private university, University of Austin, to serve as a counterpart to cancel culture. Ferguson, a former critic of Trump, is now supporter. He has visited him at Mar-A-Lago. He sees little risk that Trump will undermine our freedoms: “I’m convinced that whatever impulses he has or has had in the past, the system can contain them as it was designed to.”
Chris Rufo is no longer pretending that concern about cancel culture needs to be even-handed. He says the rules of cancel culture simply need to be rewritten:
to determine how the Right can protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts and how it can enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.
Others still cling to the idea that it was wokeness that is causing the current censorship, since it fueled the reactionary forces of Trumpism. Or relabel the right to be “the woke right” to try to maintain the relevance of the trope. If you spent the last decade being fundamentally wrong about the gravest threats to speech in America, these are clever ways to rewrite history to give the impression that you were right all along.
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Peter Baker, the New York Times White House correspondent, compared the current moment to his time at Russia at the beginning of the Putin era:
By the time we left in late 2004, Moscow had been transformed. People who had happily talked with us at the start were now afraid to return our calls. “Now I have this fear all the time,” one told us at the time. There is a similar chill now in Washington. Every day someone who used to feel free to speak publicly against Mr. Trump says they will no longer let journalists quote them by name for fear of repercussions, both Democrats and Republicans…in decades of reporting in Washington, under Republicans and Democrats, it has never felt quite like this
This is a grim comparison, but one that forces us to acknowledge the scale of the change. It is all the more astonishing since Baker is known for being famously (and even infuriatingly) non-partisan.
There is reason for hope. America has a more independent judiciary, media and civil society than Russia. But all of those institutions are themselves under attack. Their willingness to act, not their mere existence, is what gives them power. The norms do not defend themselves. As more institutions go quiet, or offer their co-operation with the new regime, the erosion of norms still occurs, even if it it occurs more slowly than it did in Russia.
Defending democracy against a coercive government poses a collective action problem: we are all better off when people are willing to publicly defend basic freedoms, but few want to be the guy standing alone in front of the tank.
So many institutions and individuals see what is going on and don’t want to say anything. To do so would threaten their livelihood or organization, or employees, or the personal safety of themselves or their families. It is understandable at an individual level, but collectively disastrous.
Courage is contagious. As people offer examples of a willingness to publicly push back, more will stand up. For example, climate scientists and misinformation researchers have fought for years against efforts to silence them. CBS apparently changed its mind about settling a frivolous lawsuit with Trump, and now promises to fight back. Some politicians are courageous despite the vitriol they have always faced. For example, AOC mocked threats by homeland security czar Tom Holman to investigate her.
Individual actions and collective organizing help to remind others that the actions of the Trump administration do not have broad support. It can’t all be on individuals, however. Universities, philanthropies, corporations, nonprofits, and professional organizations need to remind each other of the power they have, and the principles they stand for.
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Two people in Oklahoma have likely contracted measles infections linked to a mushrooming outbreak that began in West Texas, which has now risen to at least 258 cases since late January.
On Tuesday, Oklahoma's health department reported that two people had "exposure associated with the Texas and New Mexico outbreak" and then reported symptoms consistent with measles. They're currently being reported as probable cases because testing hasn't confirmed the infections.
There was no information about the ages, vaccination status, or location of the two cases. The health department said that the people stayed home in quarantine after realizing they had been exposed. In response to local media, a health department spokesperson said it was withholding further information because "these cases don’t pose a public health risk and to protect patient privacy."
In the latest data, only 88 percent of Oklahoma's kindergartners were up to date on measles vaccination, significantly below the 95 percent target to prevent community spread.
The state health department did not immediately respond to a request for more information from Ars Technica.
In a press announcement, Kendra Dougherty, director of Infectious Disease Prevention and Response for Oklahoma's health department, said: "These cases highlight the importance of being aware of measles activity as people travel or host visitors. When people know they have exposure risk and do not have immunity to measles, they can exclude themselves from public settings for the recommended duration to eliminate the risk of transmission in their community." The recommended quarantine period is 21 days to see if symptoms develop.
Measles is one of the most infectious diseases on the planet, infecting 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed. People are considered contagious starting four days before the tell-tale rash develops to four days after it appears. Potential serious complications from measles can include pneumonia, brain inflammation, compromised immune responses to secondary infections (immune amnesia), a fatal degenerative disease called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, and death.
Texas and New Mexico
Meanwhile, the Texas health department on Tuesday provided an outbreak update, raising the case count to 223, up 25 from the 198 Texas cases reported Friday. Of the Texas cases, 29 have been hospitalized and one has died—a 6-year-old girl from Gaines County, the outbreak's epicenter. The girl was unvaccinated and had no known underlying health conditions.
The outbreak continues to be primarily in unvaccinated children. Of the 223 cases, 76 are in ages 0 to 4, and 98 are between ages 5 and 17. Of the cases, 80 are unvaccinated, 138 lack vaccination status, and five are known to have received at least one dose of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine.
One dose of MMR is estimated to be 93 percent effective against measles, and two doses offers 98 percent protection. It's not unexpected to see a small number of breakthrough cases in large, localized outbreaks.
Across the border from Gaines County in Texas sits Lea County, where New Mexico officials have now documented 32 cases, with an additional case reported in neighboring Eddy County, bringing the state's current total to 33. Of those cases, one person has been hospitalized and one person (not hospitalized) died. The death was in an adult who did not seek medical care and tested positive for measles only after death. The cause of their death is under investigation.
Of New Mexico's 33 cases, 27 were unvaccinated and five did not have a vaccination status, and one had received at least one MMR dose. Eighteen of the 33 cases are in adults, 13 are ages 0 to 17, and two cases have no confirmed age.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a travel alert over the measles outbreak. "With spring and summer travel season approaching in the United States, CDC emphasizes the important role that clinicians and public health officials play in preventing the spread of measles," the agency said in the alert. It advised clinicians to be vigilant in identifying potential measles cases.
The agency stressed the importance of vaccination, putting in bold: "Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination remains the most important tool for preventing measles," while saying that "all US residents should be up to date on their MMR vaccinations."
US health secretary and long-time anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, meanwhile, has been emphasizing cod liver oil, which does not prevent measles, and falsely blaming the outbreak on poor nutrition.
America is a country of wide-open spaces, dense cities, tall mountains, lush forests, expansive deserts, and all points in between. I recommend that every American leave home and explore the great lands of this nation at least once in their life to see the kind of beauty that no photo on the internet can replicate. There are many methods to get you out there from aircraft and ships to the trusty car. But if you’re adventuring on your own, there’s no better way to go than on two wheels.
Every year, popular resorts and cruise ships fill to the brim with people seeking relaxation, entertainment, and a getaway from the stresses of daily life. Some hop in a plane and fly across the country. I propose an alternative. Instead of your normal vacation destinations and forms of travel, take the long way around. In fact, just toss out that whole destination thing. Start at home, point in whatever the opposite direction is, and just go.
The concept of traveling without a true destination seemed completely foreign to me for most of my life. My family is full of lifelong RVers. We pick a campground and the extent of the journey was hauling our camper there. The idea of a campground just being a stop on a grander adventure escaped us. Then the pandemic hit and it changed everything. I discovered a part of myself I never knew I had.
IMC Raven
You Have The Power
One of the greatest life-changing moments I’ve experienced thus far was the realization that I have more power than I thought. I spent my childhood and the very beginning years of my adult life too afraid to crack out of my shell. Constant negative thoughts permeated my brain, doubting if I could actually achieve what I wanted to do. Other thoughts told me I would be shunned for following my own path rather than the ones prescribed for me in the past.
At some point in 2018, it hit me. I already achieved so much in my life. I bought my teenage dream car and I navigated creating an entire new life for myself. Coming out as trans in late 2014 changed the trajectory of my life. I lost nearly all of my childhood friends and then lost my family for years. Yet, I emerged from the darkness triumphant. I beat the odds and found happiness in my new life. I looked forward to the future.
It was almost like a lightswitch had been flipped in my head. If I can essentially recreate a new person from the ashes of my old self, what else am I capable of?
Mercedes Streeter
I sought to find those answers. Later that year, I found myself off-roading my beloved Smart Fortwo through a forest. That weekend liberated me from the shell that contained the rest of my dreams and personality. But that wasn’t the only event. Back in May of that year, I decided to finally follow my longtime desire to ride a motorcycle. I always thought that maybe, bikes weren’t for me. They were for other, more skilled people.
Oh I was so wrong. My steed for my Motorcycle Safety Foundation Basic RiderCourse was an electric blue Honda Rebel 250. Its tank had a dent and its bars weren’t perfectly straight. Nobody else in my class dared go for the cruiser. Instead, they went for Yamaha TW200 farm bikes and Honda Nighthawk standards. I happily took the Rebel, and quickly learned that this whole motorcycle thing came naturally to me. It wasn’t long before I was taking the corners and slaloms like I was an old-timey racer.
Mercedes Streeter
On the test, I scored the shortest emergency braking distance the examiner had ever seen in over three decades of teaching the class. It took pulling in a second instructor to make sure I really did stop on a dime, impossibly close to the beginning of the score line. He then took my Rebel from me just to see if he could get anywhere close.
From that weekend forward, two wheels have always been a form of liberation I’ve yet to be able to replicate in a car. It’s hard to put my finger on why. I can theorize that part of it has to do with the fact that being on a motorcycle exposes you to the outside world. There’s no safety cage to contain and protect you; no windows to block out the weather or smells. Further, most motorcycles still involve the use of every one of your senses that isn’t taste.
Mercedes Streeter
Are both of your hands and feet critical to maintaining safe forward momentum and your safety systems? Unless you own a relatively new motorcycle, almost all of those are contained in the squishy thing inside of your skull. But even a new bike isn’t anything like a new car. Having proper reactions to your environment are essential to your survival.
Motorcycles connect humans and machines in ways most cars do not. Despite all of this, I’m still not quite sure if this is why motorcycling feels so much different than just piloting a car. Speaking of piloting, riding a motorcycle feels a lot closer to taking command of a Cessna than it does a Toyota Corolla.
Pair a rider with the perfect motorcycle for them and the result is a sort of symphony. Like an orchestra, the rider and the bike work together in perfect harmony. The euphoria from this alone can make a whole month. But there is a way to make it even better.
Travel Of Any Kind Is Great
Mercedes Streeter
In 2020, I took the journey of a lifetime. I had cash in the bank, gas in the tank of a $500 Ford Ranger, and my girlfriend at the time as my first officer. We took that four-cylinder, rear-wheel-drive, manual truck out west. But for the first time in our entire lives neither of us had a real destination. Yes, our overall goal was to visit the main Gambler 500 event out in Oregon that summer, but that was more of a pit stop, not our final destination. My girlfriend (now wife) thought we’d just get back home when we got back home. So we pointed that truck west and drove with our friends in a convoy. There was no GPS, no timetables, and we didn’t even find accommodations until we figured we needed them.
On this trip, I saw sights that I never thought I’d ever reach in my life. I saw a massive buffalo statue in North Dakota. I got to tour Yellowstone National Park and watch Old Faithful. I got to experience four seasons in the same week as I drove through a searing hot desert in Washington state, bisected rows of towering trees in Oregon, and drove through a full-blown snowstorm on my way to Crater Lake. I never knew any of this was possible. I never knew I’d ever visit Yellowstone, let alone learn that Washington had a desert! I never thought anything that I did on that trip was possible.
Mercedes Streeter
That trip also had what I still consider to be the holy grail of camping spots. Somewhere in Montana, we put our stakes down in the middle of absolute nowhere at the Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park. That night, I got to see a starry night unhindered by pollution on one end of the sky while dry lightning cracked around a nearby mountain. It was perfect.
It was during that trip when I discovered another part of me. I didn’t know I had this sense of travel and adventure in me. I swam in a crystal clear Oregon mountain lake that couldn’t have been warmer than 45 degrees. I sped along the iconic Bonneville Salt Flats, and drove on the infamous loneliest road through Nevada. In the span of two weeks I lived a life I never thought I would and all of it happened behind the wheel of a junky 1997 Ford Ranger. The last time I talked about this story was my last-ever post for Jalopnik.
I’m always thinking about what’s the next silly or great thing on the horizon. The world definitely has a whole lot of suck in it right now. And it sometimes drags me down with it. But when I swing a leg over a motorcycle or sit in that pilot or driver’s seat, it all melts away. I may not be able to control what happens in this world, but I can control this vehicle and the adventures that it will take me on.
If you can swing it, take a road trip without a destination. Do it for as long as you can and don’t be afraid to just go where your heart tells you to. When you come home, you might be a different person. That’s ok. Just remember to be true to yourself and don’t let anything or anyone stop you from being you.
But Doing It On A Bike Is Better
IMC Raven
So then, after a life-defining trip like that, you’d think I’d be all-in on cars as the best way to travel. Technically, I believe the coolest way to travel is slowly inside of a train. However, for how romantic trains are, they do have their limitations. You are stuck with the timetable of the train, and comfortable accommodations on a cross-country train tend to be substantially more expensive than just driving or flying. You also can’t really just change your direction on a whim since you’re going wherever the train is.
As I just wrote above, a car is also an excellent, grand way to travel. But over the years I’ve been learning that there’s one step higher than a car.
Mercedes Streeter
Back when I was a bit earlier into my motorcycling experience, it was common for me to spend a day riding over 300 miles. I never had anywhere to go, but I experienced the world through the visor on my helmet and on two wheels. I would stop by my favorite beach, ride into the skyscraper canyons of Chicago, and watch the fireworks display of a small town nestled between endless rows of corn. Riding to these places made me feel more alive than driving to them ever could have.
My motorcycle was the vehicle that took me to state parks, Pride events, and to countless first dates. If you were at Chicago’s Pride parade in 2019, chances are you saw me in six-inch heels commanding a 1982 Suzuki GS850G with plenty of patina. All of these connections were made infinitesimally more memorable with the subtraction of a roof and two wheels.
Mercedes Streeter
I have yet to take a cross-country motorcycle trip, but I’ve tried. In 2019, I took a Honda Elite 150D on an off-road adventure in the Gambler 500. Those 205 miles the scooter lasted before grenading its engine were some of the most fun I’ve ever had on the Gambler 500 circuit. Back in 2020, I tried to ride a Suzuki Burgman 650 some 700 miles home from the East Coast. But I blew the scooter’s rear tire in Dubois, Pennsylvania, and had to drive the remaining 500 miles home in a U-Haul. It was nice being safe and warm in the truck, but there was nothing quite like seeing the rolling hills through my visor.
Riding somewhere opens up new ways to experience the world. Instead of just looking at a forest passing by your car’s windshield, you will smell the pine in the air, feel the cool breeze rush around your body, and have a nearly completely unobstructed view of the world around you.
IMC Raven
A few weeks ago, I was reminded of this glorious truth when Indian Motorcycle (IMC) invited me out to Las Vegas to try out its new PowerPlus 112 platform. IMC’s organizers charted a 200-mile course that had influencers and journalists carving mile after mile of scenic byway that cut around Lake Mead and through the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.
(Full Disclosure: Indian Motorcycle paid for my travel, lodging, and delicious food. This post is not really related to the bikes I rode out there or the press event. But the event did provide some inspiration. A review of these motorcycles is coming.)
Once again, out here I was reminded that motorcycles were the better way to experience America. During that trip, I had my music, breathtaking views, and 126 HP of American V-twin muscle between my legs. I didn’t need anything else. Anything else would have been too much extra.
IMC Raven
As I rode through the Valley of Fire, the only thing separating me from those beautiful rock formations was some safety gear. I wasn’t surrounded by a cage and there was nothing impeding my view of the stunning environment. If you wanted to stop to really get a look at something, you just pull off, lean on the bike, and drink in the scenery. Being on the bike was travel with just the bare necessities.
As we rode through Lake Mead I got to get whiffs of the local flora and came to a stop to watch animals cross the road. We got to feel up close and personal with nature on that day and the motorcycles got us there. I imagine the feeling of riding a motorcycle is not much different than how some folks feel about traveling long distance by horse. You and your mode of transportation are one.
Mercedes Streeter
In my travels I’ve learned I’m not the only one who feels this way. Last year, my wife and I did our dream road trip, a drive down Route 66. One stop during our trip was the Meteor Crater in Arizona. While there, I saw a highly modified Triumph Rocket III with a custom front fork and a sidecar. I met the owner and his wife inside. They told me that the two of them had covered pretty much the entirety of the United States on that motorcycle, stretching from as far north as Alaska to the Southernmost Point in Florida.
Sure, they could have taken a car, they told me, but doing it on the Triumph made it feel so much more of an adventure. I’m so with them.
Mercedes Streeter
Of course, doing trips like these on just any motorcycle isn’t going to work. You’re going to hate traveling cross-country on that super cheap motorcycle I wrote about. You probably won’t have a ton of fun on a sportbike with a washboard seat, either. Most of the time, I see folks going the distance on hefty cruisers, touring bikes like the Honda Gold Wings, or modified hacks like that Triumph Rocket III.
The bike you choose for your journey should have enough power to cruise easily on the highway while also being comfortable for a full day of riding in the saddle. However many luxuries you want are up to you. Nowadays you can get sacks filled with whatever you want to drink and full-body electric heat for those cold rides.
Whatever you ride, wherever you ride, and however you ride, I recommend taking your time. Ride without a destination. Just point those forks in a destination and go. Who cares when you get home. But when you do, I think you will have found travel by bike to be one of the best ways to embark on an adventure.
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