If it’s not fixed, it’s broke, by Mary Buckheit:

There’s a new fix-ture of urban living. 
Just as bulky SUVs and expensive luxury vehicles have lost their cool with the kids in the city, so too have mega mountain bikes with tiers of teeth, and carbon-fiber, gazillion-geared, Tour-de-Finance roadsters.

Stand on any street corner and you’re bound to spot a sporty and simple breed of speed. They’re everywhere — sewing through New York traffic, circling the squares of Boston, flying down San Francisco hills and hanging from the hooks of Portland’s public transport.

Though fixed-gear bicycles have been experiencing an urbanite riding renaissance for the past decade, they’ve been around for centuries and obviously preceded their multispeed brethren. (The first Tour de France was staged in 1903. Roger Lapebie, who won the Tour in 1937, was the first to win it on a geared bike. You do the math.)

Henri Desgrange, the originator of the Tour de France, and tyrannical cycling purist, is known to have denounced multispeed bikes, saying, “I still feel that the variable gears are only for people over 45. Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft. As for me, give me a fixed-gear!”

The article is a lot longer, and you can read it right here. Don’t be scared, it’s a good read!