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Watching Apple Health
The big story about the future of everyone's health and wellbeing this week seemed to involve Tuesday night's Presidential Debate, and as such there wasn't a lot of news about fitness technology for me to summarize here. Once upon a time, perhaps, Apple'
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Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is one of the best selling piece of educational software of all time. First released in 1987 by game developer Toolworks, the program offered interactive typing drills designed to improve the speed and accuracy of users' keyboard skills. The cover of the box featured Renée
Watched, But Not Optimized
On Tuesday, my Garmin said I slept 2 minutes. One problem (or rather, the first in a series of problems with this record): it was 8am, and I get up every morning at 6. I wasn't even in bed at 8, let alone asleep. (Indeed, I think I
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Lactate Meters and Labor Day Weekend
You can tell that folks are gearing up for the last week of summer, as marked – in the US, at least – by the "back-to-school" season. Things have been pretty quiet this week, save the steady drumbeat of marketing emails about Labor Day sales from every company from which
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Earlier this month, Virginia Sole-Smith, bestselling author of Fat Talk, published a podcast/essay titled "Nobody Cares About Your 'Health and Fitness' Journey." I'm not a premium subscriber to her Burnt Toast newsletter, I confess, so I couldn't listen or read; and
What Computers Cannot Do (for Health and Fitness)
Happy Friday! What's good? Here are some of the latest stories about the intersection of health and fitness and technology (and money). Speaking of money, I'm, like, 20 years late to the game, but I just started reading Michael Lewis's Moneyball, in part because
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Cooling Technologies, "Cool" Technologies, and Not At All Cool Technologies
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling that end-of-summer, post-Olympics melancholy this week, so this will be a fairly short one. (Shorter than Monday’s massive missive, at least.) I'd say I'm feeling a bit resentful that I'm having
Teaching Machines (for Bodies, Not Brains)
Many histories of education technology start with the hornbook, a fifteenth century invention that, according to Bill Ferster, "married pedagogy and content knowledge into a physical device" — a device that allowed students to learn their letters (without tearing up or writing in an actual book, I guess). Of
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An author I very much admire complained on Facebook recently that the Olympics are an example of "scarcity economics" – only one gold medal so we don't celebrate everyone's immense talent. The Games – all manner of sports contests, she said – are closely bound up in
The Technologies of the Olympics, Continued
Wow. The US is having one helluva track meet over there in Paris. I'll have more to say in Monday's newsletter – Cole Hocker!!! – as I really am trying to restrict Friday's email to news about health and fitness technology, not just news about my
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Maybe Not the Sports Technologies You Were Expecting
As a writer about and critic of education technology, I was often asked "what's your favorite piece of ed-tech" – some sort of "gotcha" question, I reckon, in which I was supposed to confess that, in fact, I hate everything. I'd answer "
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Passing the Torch
Things feel like they've shifted maybe? I mean, is this what it feels like to have hope again? None of us knows if we can do this. And we are about to do it anyway. And the combination of those truths helped me, in those vertiginous few minutes,
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One of the downsides, I guess, of waiting until Sunday afternoon to write my "Extra Mile" newsletter is that it feels like everyone else has already published their "take" on the week's news. So anything I have to say feels like a repetition of
When a Swim in the Seine Isn't the Week's Zaniest News
Well. The last week has been a year, hasn't it. I will have much more to say on Silicon Valley's Veep candidate and his investment portfolio, along with the latest updates on AI in education in Monday's "The Extra Mile." Let'
The Race Report
A terrible person once said something pithy about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns” — and my, wouldn’t it be a better world if he had been talking about one’s first triathlon and not, say, the fabrications the Bush Administration used to justify the Iraq War. Because the
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Travis Barker on the Treadmill and Other Fitness Content Slop
In this week's Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick argues that "content slop" is much more pervasive – the problem much more insidious – than the AI-generated memes that have garnered quite a bit of attention lately. You know, the shrimp-Jesus images that are all over Facebook. "Content
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The Supreme Court and Bad Health Tricks
It's been a very bad week for democracy — in many ways, in many places, in many directions, the most obvious and egregious of these being the Supreme Court’s decision in the aptly named Trump v United States. A bad week for democracy means a bad week for