About Footnotes
Footnotes is a newsletter about movement in all its meanings.
Explore the cultural, historical, and existential terrain of life on foot: the philosophy of walking, the politics of public space, the rituals of runners, the violent poetry of a bike crash, and the quiet power of sidewalks, streets, and trails.
Stories explore the joy of motion, but also exhaustion, urban design, memory, and the body’s resistance to being optimized. From medieval monks to modern marathoners, from stroller jogs to protest marches, Footnotes traces how we live, think, and connect through movement.
Footnotes a cultural-literary project about human movement with feet-on-the-ground thinking about endurance, cities, capitalism, and time. Think The Atlantic in sneakers.
Really thought-provoking writing about life from a runner's perspective -- I always love it when Sam's latest lands in my inbox.
— Terrell Johnson, The Half Marathoner
I always look forward to reading Sam’s thoughts on running and life. He keeps me grounded as a runner and a human being. There is always some new insight he shares that helps me see things from a different perspective which I love.
— Rizwan Javaid, Low Fidelity
Each week, you’ll find:
Stories on the history and politics of running and walking
First-person meditations on time, routine, and body
Deep dives into infrastructure, ritual, and gear
Interviews with thinkers, athletes, planners, and wanderers
Dispatches from the margins: old roads, new paths, lost trails
Popular posts
The author
is a writer, runner, cyclist, and wayward historian. His work has appeared in Trail Runner, Outside, and elsewhere. He lives in Oakland with his family and still believes the best ideas come on foot.