Back in the late 2000s, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was the world’s coolest neighborhood. And if lifestyle blogs were to be believed, everyone in Williamsburg rode a bike. But not everyone in New York did, and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to change that. He installed hundreds of miles of bike lanes throughout the city, which had the potential to cut both pollution and traffic deaths.

In the Hasidic section of South Williamsburg, the Department of Transportation striped a white corridor down a particularly chaotic section of Bedford Avenue, home to kosher grocery stores and Hasidic apartment buildings. Locals, already wary of outsiders, were furious. To them, bikes were not symbols of hip urbanism but of unwelcome intrusion—particularly by women riders whose clothes offended the community’s religious mandate of strict modesty.

Ahead of Bloomberg’s reelection bid, the city removed the bike lane. A few nights later, the Hasidic community patrol found renegade cyclists repainting it at 3:30 a.m. The city got rid of the DIY lane, too, leaving the two sides debating for months, but the lane never reappeared. Cyclists still ride that stretch, finding their own path through tightly crammed vehicles. The Hasidim still seem to resent the cyclists. The conflict grinds on.

Read: The design bible that changed how Americans bike in cities

Substitute 1890 for 2009, or London for New York, and this episode looks the same as any other in the endless drama between cyclists and the people who live begrudgingly alongside them. From their debut in the 1800s, bicycles have been a confounding presence on the streets, their riders’ unpredictable careening infuriating carriage drivers, then car drivers, and, the whole time, pedestrians. For just as long, many cyclists have tightly held on to a sense of moral superiority about their machines. As climate collapse looms, bicycles have taken on a saintly quality, extolled as squeaky-clean instruments of penance for wealthy countries’ carbon emissions.

Or at least, that’s the story that many of us, especially in the global North, tell ourselves about bicycles. What’s missing from it could fill a book, which Jody Rosen, a New York Times Magazine contributor and lifelong cyclist, has written. Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle takes readers time-traveling and globe-trotting to build up an alternate narrative about a simple machine that becomes harder to categorize the more you learn about it. Through history and across cultures, bicycles are a human denominator. Their past and future concern us all—even if you don’t think they have anything to do with you.  

The first machine resembling a bicycle emerged in 1817 from the workshop of the German inventor Baron Karl von Drais. His Laufmaschine (“running machine”) was essentially a balance bike—two wheels connected by a seat, which the rider pushed forward with their feet. It took until the turn of the century for the bicycle to evolve into what we ride today: two evenly sized wheels connected via a frame and propelled by a pedal-powered drivetrain. This iteration of the bike really took off, transforming the machine from a reviled plaything of the idle rich to a threatening equalizer of the classes and the sexes. (Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that cycling was doing “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”)

Rosen covers this early history because he has to, but immediately starts mining it for nuance. “The bicycle is a populist project, the result of grassroots innovation and an exchange of knowledge that runs in all directions,” he writes, acknowledging that hobbyists retrofitted its design nearly from the beginning. He connects those amateur engineers to both Vietnamese guerrilla fighters who packed anti-French, and then anti-American, bombs into their frames, and to American “freak bike” clubs that solder together endearingly bizarre contraptions that are almost impossible to ride. Even when they’re a bit of a stretch, these historical and global parallels, which Rosen draws throughout the book, disentangle bicycles from the ownership of any one time or type of person.  

Having the motivation to write this much about bikes requires loving them, which Rosen does, deeply. After a childhood spent admiring bicycle design, he fell hard for riding as a messenger in Boston during college (“I’ve definitely never had a more pleasurable job,” he says), an experience that made him a lifelong enthusiast but not a pedantic gearhead. Even after decades of cycling he regards it with a fresh mind, still in awe of the pure joy of the experience. In the passages where he describes what it actually feels like to ride, he makes it sound irresistible:

[On] a particularly free-flowing ride, [your] body and being—shoulders, hands, hips, legs, bones, muscles, skin, brain—seem to be inseparable from the strong but supple bicycle frame. At such moments, to conceive of the bike as a vehicle is perhaps not quite right. It may be more accurate to think of it as a prosthesis. Ideally, it is hard to say exactly where the bicyclist ends and the bicycle begins.

His enthusiasm does occasionally overwhelm. Fascinating tidbits organized by loose themes, abrupt topical switches within sections, and chapters on trick cycling, exercise bikes, and bikes as sex objects make the book comprehensive but also unfocused. Still, the meandering structure often feels like a leisurely ride, full of spontaneous detours into unexpected delight.

But what makes the book essential is its rigorous reporting. Rosen holds his responsibility as a journalist higher than his love for his subject, sharing unflattering and sometimes bleak truths about bicycles that rust their shining image. Like the lithium that powers electric-car batteries (and e-bikes), the materials that bikes are made from are steeped in the blood of the global South. Rubber for early bike tires was harvested in the late 1800s by laborers in Portuguese Brazil and others in Belgian Congo, whom the colonizers mutilated or murdered by the millions. The asphalt that first paved major American and European cities around the same time (it was cyclists who first successfully demanded smoothed-out streets) came from Pitch Lake in Trinidad, then owned by American business interests in contract with imperial Britain, and later exploited mostly for foreign benefit despite being state-owned; Trinidadians still saw almost none of the benefit after more than a century of their labor.

Bicycles can also themselves be a vehicle for colonialism. Klondike bicycles, designed (albeit poorly) to navigate unpaved terrain in cold temperatures, helped 1890s gold prospectors in Canada more thoroughly exploit land that had long belonged to Indigenous communities. Bike lanes like the ones that bedeviled the Hasidim are also, in historically Black and Latino neighborhoods in the U.S., omens for displacement. Rosen doesn’t wrestle with these stories so much as list them in thorny intertwinings, challenging readers to put aside any assumptions they might have had about bikes before picking up the book.

To prove both the flexibility and unwavering functional value of bicycles, Rosen looks, near the end of the book, toward adjacent machines: the tricycles piloted by Dhaka’s impoverished rickshawallahs, and the e-bikes that New York City’s mostly immigrant deliveristas use to drop off takeout. Both types of work are grueling and exploitative, and the people doing them face government bans of the tools of their livelihoods. But as police and bureaucrats in those and many other cities have had to accept, there is no eliminating bicycles, or the various forms of transportation derived from them. Their promise of some sort of freedom, whether personal or economic, is too great to be suppressed.

[Read: I’m risking my life to bring you ramen]

This holds true whether you ride for work, pleasure, or simple transportation. The world’s rickshawallahs and deliveristas use their modified bikes to navigate an economy that marginalizes them, so they likely don’t romanticize their rides the way that hobbyists like Rosen (or me) do. But anyone who cycles does so because that’s how you get where you’re going mostly on your own terms, something that no other form of transportation allows for in quite the same way. Bicycle history may be complicated, but the reason it’s such a long history is not. Everyone appreciates a hint of self-determination.

Amid the Hasid-hipster uproar, a self-appointed peacemaker named Baruch Herzfeld, a 30-something Modern Orthodox Jew who ran a bike shop on the edge of the neighborhood, tried several times to get the two sides talking. In 2010 he told The Atlantic that outsiders had been missing important context for the controversy: In this particular Hasidic community, typically only children rode bicycles. Brawling over something that they considered a toy likely made the whole thing not just infuriating but perplexing for the Hasidim.

But by Herzfield’s telling, a few Hasidic men would also rent bikes covertly at night, sometimes returning overwhelmed with joy—“They say, ‘It’s beautiful! It’s wonderful!’” Bikes became little miracles that zipped them through an enlivening, novel tour of their own neighborhood. Finding a personal relationship with bikes had changed their minds about who could ride. All it took was someone leading the way.

If non-bike people can be persuaded to read it, Two Wheels Good might do the same thing. In showing that bikes have always been complicated—accessories to some and essential to others, means of recreation and of labor, signifiers of both wealth and poverty—Rosen also shows that they are universal, inviting even the most skeptical readers along with his humility and humor. Bicycles don’t belong to hipsters in Brooklyn or to parents in Copenhagen, and riding one doesn’t have to signify anything about the rider. You needn’t give your bike a second thought if you don’t want to. In all of their complexity, and maybe because of it, bicycles have always been, and will always be, for everyone.

Last month, I was savagely attacked by The Onion: “Package That Arrived in 24 Hours Sits Unopened on Table for Week,” read the headline. The reality was even worse than the satire. A package delivered in just two days had been sitting on the desk in front of me since January. I still haven’t opened it.

With more than half of U.S. adults wielding Amazon Prime memberships, I’m clearly not alone in getting deliveries faster than I probably need them. All injury aside, this bit of ridicule illustrates one specific irony of contemporary consumer life: Despite worker shortages, supply-chain snarls, and a pandemic that has oriented many people’s lives around the home, the quest for faster delivery has actually intensified over the past two years. At least 36 percent of Americans are now using same-day delivery, while delivery apps such as Shipt, for example, promise some deliveries in as little as an hour.

And yet, somehow, that still doesn’t seem to be fast enough. In recent months, there’s been a boom in apps promising to deliver food and household goods on astonishingly tight turnarounds, some of them in 15 minutes or less. Featuring very start-up-y names—Gopuff, Jokr, Gorillas, Getir—these companies rely on their own private neighborhood supermarkets (ominously called “dark stores”), which allows them to ferry goods and groceries far quicker than bigger players such as Amazon Fresh and FreshDirect. So far, the majority of these companies are available only in pockets of major cities such as New York and Boston (as well as in parts of Europe), but the business model has been catnip for venture capitalists: According to the research firm PitchBook, VCs sank $9.7 billion into hyper-fast-delivery companies last year alone. Other industry stalwarts, such as Instacart and DoorDash, are following their lead and entering the fray.

Still, in retail as in life, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Getting groceries at warp speed comes with very real consequences. There’s the potential safety hazard for workers and pedestrians in an already dangerous industry, or the reality that these start-ups, many of which require smartphones, aren’t terribly democratic compared with the bodegas and corner stores they may someday replace. But perhaps the biggest potential toll of the rapid-delivery craze is what it could do to all of us as consumers. Regardless of whether these start-ups take root everywhere, they already seem destined to have an effect on the broader consumer mindset about when we should expect our deliveries to come. Faster delivery has a way of making the rest of life seem irritatingly slow and, in America, that practically constitutes a mortal sin.

The elevator pitch for hyper-fast delivery doesn’t require much imagination. The app-driven thrill of shallots delivered quicker than your pasta water comes to a boil is a dream for a home chef in the way that 15-minute Doritos is a godsend for the hangry among us. Especially for consumers with limited mobility, the upside can be meaningful. Best of all, instead of relying on independent contractors like most other delivery and ride-sharing apps in the gig economy do, the companies tend to hire their own staffers and provide them with e-bikes and scooters to meet their very tight deadlines. Naturally, the prices for groceries through these apps tend to run higher than what you would find in a traditional supermarket, but in some cases, it’s not that much more expensive. For example, through Gorillas, among the biggest of the hyper-fast start-ups, a loaf of Dave’s Killer Bread runs $6.49, while the same item is $4.94 at Whole Foods.

Though the technology behind 15-minute delivery may be new, if anything, it’s simply the latest iteration of a particular American restlessness and love of gimmickry. By now, our obsession with delivery speeds might as well be a national pastime. “Here in the U.S.—and this has, in some ways, always been true, even compared to Europe or other places—there’s been this reference point of an efficient economy,” Ashwani Monga, a marketing professor at Rutgers University who studies consumer psychology, told me. “When you talk about efficiency and productivity, you’re basically asking, ‘How much can I do in the least amount of time?’ And that reference point keeps changing every few years.”

Centuries before these delivery apps became the centerpieces of euphoric VC pitch decks, entrepreneurs were pushing the boundaries of these reference points—expanding expectations by narrowing time frames. Even when these innovations failed or became outdated, the new standards have had a way of embedding themselves. Take the Pony Express, for example. Before the transcontinental telegraph put it out of business in 1861, the Pony Express pledged that a letter from Missouri could reach California in 10 days or fewer. Prior to that, correspondence sent cross-country could take weeks or even months by ship or stagecoach. But like the couriers on e-bikes gunning to make deliveries in 15-minute windows, a lesser-noted part of the Pony Express mythology were the riders deployed to achieve these feats in just 10 days. As one foreboding Pony Express recruitment poster revealed, the company sought out “young, skinny, wiry fellows” who were under 18, preferably orphans, and willing to risk death. (In the 19 months that the service operated, at least eight riders died in a variety of gruesome ways.)

Of course, America didn’t stop going to extreme lengths to pursue more efficient delivery. Fast-forward to 1984, when the country lost its mind over Domino’s “30 Minutes or It’s Free” pizza-delivery promotion. As anyone who remembers dial-up internet knows, the deal infiltrated popular culture, serving as a bit in countless movies and TV shows, while also powering Domino’s to become the world’s largest pizza chain. The promotion became so popular and so costly that the company later had to amend it to a $3 discount. The deal was scrapped in 1993, but by then it was too late: Domino’s 30-minute guarantee created a standard for pizza delivery that didn’t exist before and has never entirely gone away since.

With the proliferation of 15-minute-delivery apps, it’s not hard to see the contours of a new consumer standard taking hold—because a new consumer standard is what Americans seem to want. Since the start of the pandemic, a majority of American consumers have not only compressed their baseline expectation of shipping times to just a few days, but also expressed a willingness to pay more to get even shorter delivery time frames than that. This is happening even as the adoption and commercial viability of 15-minute delivery are far from forgone conclusions. One well-known quirk of VC-funded start-ups is that they don’t always require immediate profitability (or even semi-immediate profitability). And delivering goods or groceries that quickly without also charging $10 for a banana may not be a winning business formula. In March, two Russian-funded apps, Fridge No More and Buyk, suddenly collapsed under U.S. sanctions, while Gorillas has started to backtrack on its initial delivery promise.

Unfortunately, once a new standard exists, it’s very hard to claw an older one back. And whether it’s the Pony Express, Domino’s, or Amazon Prime, newfangled standards and fresh consumer reference points always come at a cost. Even as technological improvements abet America’s obsession with efficiency, consumers still seem to miss what the effect of ever-quickening delivery means for themselves and for those doing the heavy lifting. Domino’s 30-minute policy met with a disastrous ending after a series of serious and even fatal car crashes that involved on-the-job delivery drivers who were accused of rushing to keep their company’s promise.

Meanwhile, the massive challenges facing the workers who power Amazon’s two-day delivery apparatus have become the stuff of legend. Though 15-minute-delivery workers seem to have better conditions than other urban delivery workers, the results could still get ugly. Delivery is a dangerous business. In New York City, some lawmakers are trying to ban the 15-minute promise for precisely that reason.

More broadly, though, the problem is that this thirst for speed doesn’t actually make our lives appreciably easier or better. The delivery blitz from an hour to 30 minutes to 15 is evidence of absurdity more than innovation. In most cases, we don’t truly need things immediately, and, even as the market hustles to set a new standard, the benefits tend to wear off rapidly. “As humans, we quickly adapt to new reference points, but it doesn’t necessarily make us happier,” Monga said. “If everyone’s packages arrive in two days, then we’re all equally happy, just as we were when we would get things in 10 days. In fact, there’s a term for it called ‘hedonic adaptation.’”

Regardless of whether 15 minutes becomes a new defining standard of service, it seems evident that our constantly shortening reference points just make us feel more impatient all the time. It’s visible in the irritation about supply-chain woes or the eternal fury about hold times. The attraction of hyper-fast delivery is the natural extension of this over-optimized mindset, where the desire to think reflexively about getting groceries as soon as possible obscures what it’s doing to us and others in the process.

In a perfect world, none of us would need anything in 15 minutes. Barring that, we could always find a less harmful piece of satire to inhabit.

This week, for the first time in my career, I found out about a mass shooting in America just like most of you: not from a TV producer breaking into my earpiece on live TV, or a CNN internal email alert, or from someone shouting in the newsroom, but from a friend.

And I’m processing it with something new: a feeling of deep cynicism. Before, when I was in it, I believed something would change. At CNN, where I worked until 2021, we hosted town halls. I brought together survivors of Parkland with survivors of Columbine, to reflect on two school shootings that occurred two decades apart. I looked these survivors in the eye and believed, along with them, that change was going to come.

Now I know how unsure that change is. That’s partly because of political inaction; Washington hasn’t changed gun laws much. But it’s also because of media coverage.

A day after the shooting in Parkland, Florida, I was standing outside the school next to Representative Ted Deutch, listening to the wails of a mother who had just lost her teenage daughter. Her screams pierced my heart. I stood under the hot camera lights and Florida sun, stuttering, trying to fill the silence, until I allowed my tears to fall on live TV.

The next day, one of my producers interrupted our broadcast from Florida and spoke into my earpiece. News was breaking about President Donald Trump and the FBI. My producer assured me that we’d return to coverage in Parkland, but that right then—I’ll never forget it—“we have to break away to go live to Washington.” But. But. But. Fourteen students were dead. I stood there dumbfounded. A teacher from the school was just out of camera range, waiting to join me for a five-minute live interview. I used the pause in coverage to tell her what was happening and told her that we’d get to her, that her story mattered. But I already knew then that they weren’t coming back to us.

Outside of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I waited to reappear on my own show, furiously emailing my producers back at CNN headquarters to fight for more airtime on what was happening at Parkland: Come back to me. The teacher! Soon after, I got my marching orders: Come back to New York. I knew what that meant: We were done.

In 2006 I covered my first mass shooting at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania. Then Virginia Tech. Tucson. Aurora. Newtown. Fort Hood. Isla Vista. Waco. Charleston. Chattanooga. Lafayette. Moneta. Roseburg. Colorado Springs. San Bernardino. Orlando. Dallas. Baton Rouge. Fort Lauderdale. Alexandria. San Francisco. New York City. Little Rock. Antioch. Las Vegas. Sutherland Springs. Parkland. San Bruno. Nashville. Annapolis. Pittsburgh. Thousand Oaks. Poway. Gilroy. El Paso. Dayton. Midland-Odessa. And those are just the ones that immediately come to mind.

I see it differently this time, removed from the race to rush to Texas and the pressure to land interviews with victims’ families surrounded by the makeshift vigils of flickering candles, teddy bears, and crime tape. Let me tell you what will happen: The news media will be in Texas through this weekend, and then news executives will start paring down the coverage next week. The conversation has already turned to politics, as some pundits urge a focus on mental health and others on guns. Some journalists will try to hold our elected representatives’ feet to the fire. A segment or two will go viral. Americans will share their outrage on social media. And then another story will break next week, and the news cycle will move on.

After a week or 10 days, the outraged public grows tired of hearing about the carnage, loss, and inaction. The audience starts to drop off. The ratings dip. And networks worry about their bottom line. And while the journalists in the field have compassion for the victims of these tragic stories, their bosses at the networks treat the news as ratings-generating revenue sources. No ratings? Less coverage. It’s as simple as that.

Having been part of the cable-news machine for more than a decade, I have a few ideas about how it can be fixed. Some of the children at Robb Elementary needed to be identified by DNA because their bodies were ripped apart by assault-style weapons. I remember standing in silence as I watched one tiny white casket wheeled out of a funeral home when I was covering Sandy Hook in 2012. I had the thought then: Would minds change about guns in America if we got permission to show what was left of the children before they were placed in the caskets? Would a grieving parent ever agree to do this? I figured this would never happen. But perhaps now is finally the time to ask.

Television networks regularly assign correspondents to beats—specific topics such as the White House, crime and justice, or the State Department—where journalists can take time to specialize, dig deep, and doggedly chase tips. How about adding mass shootings as a regular beat? Reporters should pound on the doors of senators who continue to vote no on gun-control legislation, who are prepared to sacrifice lives on the altar of the NRA and the good ol’ boys.

And news executives should spend what it takes to stay a little longer in these communities. Respect the wishes of the victims’ families, but tell that story in every show so that the audience can’t look away. I know that keeping crews in the field is expensive, but 19 children and two teachers? There is no higher cost than that.