I quit my afternoon coffee. Not because I wanted to — because I found something better.

You know that wall you hit every day around 2–3 PM? I used to just accept it as the cost of doing anything. Another coffee, a quick spike, then the crash — and somehow I'd still feel dehydrated by dinner.

Then I tried X·E Fountain, Pique's brand-new electrolyte energy drink, and I genuinely wasn't ready for how good "no crash" could feel.

No caffeine jitters. No 4 PM slump. Just clean, steady energy that actually hydrates me instead of draining me. It's built with a premium Vitamin B Complex for natural cellular energy, Magnesium Malate + Taurate for real focus, and a full electrolyte blend that makes it feel like a treat, not a chore.

The cucumber-celery-lime flavor is so crisp and refreshing — it's basically stolen my afternoon coffee slot completely.

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I went back to Houston for a while. Every ten years you need to swing back by and renew your passport, see friends and family, and wreak general havoc so people don’t forget you.

I like walking and biking, so Houston has always been a problem for me. This is a town where the sidewalk ends. And ends again. And ends again.

But this time, I visited the new 150 miles of paths they have built along the bayou. And, for the first time, there is actually a proper city area to walk, to gather, to play volleyball, to zoom around on motorized skateboards with a little speaker blasting UGK.

Still, you have to drive there to do all that. So it's more park-and-walk than actual walk. But it’s a start.

One of the best parts about living and traveling abroad is being able to walk around town without needing cars, parking garages, tickets, railroad crossing-style gates that raise and lower for each car, honking horns, and everyone in their own cocoons.

Most US cities chose the car. If you are a person, like me, who prefers plazas and walkable cities, you might want to reevaluate your location.

When Houston opened its downtown light rail, people called it the Wham Bam Tram, named for all the cars that kept turning in front of it. That's my hometown. You'd get made fun of for taking the bus. More oil, more lanes, more parking. This is how the city was designed, if one can call that design.

Still, Houston is the most underrated city in America. The diversity of the food scene alone should end that argument. And to its credit, Houston has been trying to undo some of its own design. The Buffalo Bayou renovation turned 160 acres along the water into trails and gathering places. Allen Parkway got rebuilt to move high-speed traffic away from the park and add pedestrian crossings that link neighborhoods straight into the green space.

One new development on the bayou even (allegedly) hired Jeff Speck, the guy who wrote the book on walking in cities, as a consultant. Houston knows. And of course, there's nothing anyone can do about the weather except survive the sprint to your car and crank the AC. Some problems aren't design problems.

A few Sundays ago, I was standing in the middle of a major avenue in Medellín, not on the sidewalk, in the street. Cars are banned for ciclovía, the Sunday ritual where main roads close to traffic and open to everyone else. Families five across, people on bikes, someone selling mango with lime and salt. It happens every Sunday. It’s where you run into all your friends and sometimes foes, but it builds community through walking.

And there is the extra benefit of feeling a little naughty walking in the middle of the road.

Within three blocks of my Medellín apartment, there's a park, cafés, street food, a flower shop, a tailor, a dentist, a computer repair guy, markets, smoothie stands, bars, restaurants. Three blocks. And this isn't a luxury district, or some fancy shopping district, or a tourist district. It’s just town. A student, a working family, a retired abuela, everyone's in the same parks, the same metro, the same gondolas running up the hillside. In America, that three-block life exists in Manhattan, in a handful of neighborhoods in Chicago or Boston, and you'll pay some of the highest rents in the country for it. Walkability is priced like a penthouse amenity. In most of the world, it's just called a neighborhood.

So how did the richest country on earth make walking a luxury good? Partly by verdict, partly by choice. The conspiracy version is that a GM-backed company bought up more than a hundred streetcar systems in forty-five cities, including the trolleys that once ran through Hollywood, and ripped them out to sell cars.

Maybe this is more than a conspiracy because GM and its partners were convicted in federal court in 1949. But historians will tell you the streetcars were struggling anyway. Buses were cheaper. People genuinely wanted cars. Then came the 1956 Highway Act: $25 billion, 41,000 miles of freeway, passed while GM's own former president was running the Defense Department. Call it a conspiracy or call it a preference with a very good lobbyist.

Either way, America bulldozed the neighborhood to build the commute.

And sure, the suburbs made sense for the people who chose them. If you're raising a Brady Bunch, a yard and a cul-de-sac is a reasonable dream. But not everyone is raising a Brady Bunch. Plenty of people, single, child-free or a child or two, empty-nested or just wired for city life, want to be surrounded by humans, not lawns that require mowing and neighborly comparisons. You already pay for the park with your taxes. And so few people spend any time on their lawns anyway. Mostly they are just for looks.

But now, like this Buffalo Bayou Park development, American cities are now spending billions retrofitting the street life they spent decades removing, because it turns out the demand was there all along.

My conclusion after years away: I don't think I could live in a car city again. Once you've been spoiled by the luxury of walking, a life that happens also in between destinations, you can't give it back. And if the life you want isn't for sale where you live, or is only for sale at Manhattan prices, then designing your life might mean moving. Another neighborhood. Another city. Maybe another country.

The pursuit of happiness is right there in the founding documents. It's not a suggestion. Walk toward it.

🇺🇸 U.S. (Inbound) - Breaking this week: Trump extended the $100,000 H-1B fee through September 2027, and separately ordered new H-1B restrictions and Labor Department reviews of prevailing wage rules. A federal court also just blocked the DHS rule that would have capped F-1 student and J-1 exchange visitor stays at four years. A lot of moving parts - watch this space.

🇪🇺 EU / Schengen (EES) - The Entry/Exit System has been fully operational across all Schengen borders since April 10, 2026, biometrically tracking every non-EU arrival and exit. If you travel frequently between the U.S. and Europe, your 90-in-180-day limit is now being enforced by a computer, not a bored border agent's memory.

🇵🇹 Portugal - Processing backlog reality for new applicants: AIMA is currently processing applications filed in mid-2022, meaning 3-plus years before a first residence card. The new 10-year citizenship clock only starts once that card is issued. Factor accordingly.

🇬🇷 Greece - Still the most compelling retirement story in Europe: ranked number one in International Living's 2026 Global Retirement Index, 7% flat tax on foreign pension income, and a 7-year path to citizenship that now runs three years shorter than Portugal's.

🇹🇼 Taiwan - Expanded its digital nomad visa to a 2-year stay as of January 8, 2026, renewable up to three times. Income bar is $40,000/year if you're 30 or over, $20,000 if you're 20 to 29. One of the cleaner programs in Asia right now.

🇰🇷 South Korea - The F-1-D workation visa became permanent on June 30, with stays extended to 3 years and family members allowed as dependents. Income threshold runs around $74,000/year standard, dropping to roughly $37,000 for applicants under 35 settling outside Seoul and its metro area.

🇨🇴 Colombia - The perpetual tourist crackdown across Latin America is real, and Colombia is part of it. Immigration enforcement of rolling 90-day tourist stays is tightening. If you live here without a visa, the window to get formal is narrowing fast.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

I picked this up totally at random at Barnes & Noble, where it happened to be the monthly pick. The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Suggars is exceedingly imaginative, maybe even to a fault.

It's what's called “portal” fiction, where a character steps through a threshold into another realm. Narnia is probably the most famous example with the wardrobe door. Harry Potter counts too, via Platform 9 ¾.

Lighthouse is very British. It opens on hoodlums, crooks, and con men playing three-card monte for about a thousand quid a day. It sounds like a great haul until you realize the collateral damage: who needs payoffs, how much the big boss takes, and how quickly things go sideways when rival gangs, coppers, and marks who've just realized they got ripped off come looking for you. We follow Oyster, the low man in the gang. His father disappeared years ago, leaving the family struggling, so now he works under a boss named Big Mickey, just trying to find his footing. You know the story, the version of that life that's exciting until it isn't.

That life seems exhilarating enough until Oyster slips through a fence at night into what looks like broad daylight, finding himself in a place that resembles London, but is in fact "Greater London." That's when the book's almost hyperactive imagination kicks in. It lives somewhere in the neighborhood of Brazil, Doctor Who, A Clockwork Orange, and general bizarro fantasy. I enjoyed it, and if you like that brand of chaos, you will too. Innit.

If I have one grievance, it's about sticking to the rules of worldbuilding. Your world can be anything, magic, upside-down towns, populated by giant Hedwig-esque ink beetles and living, walking buildings, but it still needs internal rules, and breaking them risks shattering the illusion. Luckily, the novel throws so much kitchen-sink imagination at you that the moments where the rules bend get forgotten fast, but the fault is still there.

If you're in the mood for an inventive, high-velocity portal story, it's well worth a look.

Buy it here.

Ray is a former traffic engineer who quit his day job to make YouTube videos about what's broken in American urban design. Snarky, data-driven, genuinely angry about parking minimums.

In Miami: Ultra-Livable Paradise or Car-Dependent Nightmare, he lands on "walkable urbanism for the rich," which is this entire issue in four words.

Then Walkable Cities But They Keep Getting More Affordable for the hopeful counterpoint.

A Video Essay on what happened to American style:

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.