Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is vocal about his view that Americans overuse psychiatric medications, particularly antidepressants. As a general rule, the health and human services secretary is skeptical of pharmaceuticals, but he’s gone further in his critiques of SSRIs, suggesting without credible evidence that their use might be linked to violent behavior, including school shootings. This past spring, he announced plans to discourage doctors from prescribing antidepressants and encourage them to de-prescribe the drugs—that is, to help patients who have previously been prescribed SSRIs stop taking them.

According to a recent survey, about 17 percent of American adults take an antidepressant. Some of them are my patients, many of whom were upset or infuriated by Kennedy’s move to rein in the prescribing of drugs whose benefits they have experienced firsthand. One of my patients, who has tried to stop taking Zoloft several times only for his depression to recur, told me that he couldn’t understand why the nation’s health secretary might want to discourage people from taking the SSRIs they’ve been prescribed.

Kennedy’s claim that antidepressants are overprescribed contains a grain of truth. Some patients receive antidepressants without really needing them or stay on them for longer than necessary. Earlier this year, an independent task force of psychiatrists suggested that more attention be paid to how and when patients and their doctors test whether tapering off these medications would be reasonable. In fact, inappropriate prescribing creates the impression among both patients and doctors that antidepressants are less effective than they are.

When Kennedy talks about de-prescribing antidepressants, exactly what he’s proposing remains unclear. He doesn’t specify which groups of depressed patients he believes can stop their medication. In fact, contrary to his often-heated rhetoric about SSRIs, he said in May when announcing the de-prescription measures that “if you are taking psychiatric medication, we are not telling you to stop”—and then encouraged such patients to “make the right decision” in consultation with their doctor. The benefits of antidepressants vary greatly. There is abundant evidence that antidepressants are effective for people who have moderate or more severe forms of depression. If you feel persistently sad, believe that life isn’t worth living, and lose your energy, appetite, concentration, or ability to experience pleasure, you likely have clinical depression, and your symptoms would be good targets for antidepressant treatment. But the same is not true of people experiencing what psychiatrists call everyday distress. Feeling, say, unhappy in a soul-sucking job or grief-stricken over the loss of a loved one are painful but entirely appropriate emotional responses. They call for changing your situation or contacting a friend for support, not for an antidepressant.

[Read: Talk to your doctor about your distrust of public health]

Taking an SSRI in such a scenario would be like prescribing an antibiotic for a common cold: a waste of resources that’s likely to only give the patient side effects and leave them questioning the efficacy of the drug. Some providers nevertheless prescribe antidepressants for everyday distress. I’ve seen patients going through grief or job loss who were prescribed SSRIs by my colleagues, perhaps because they thought the patients were right on the edge of depression. And in the clinic where I teach and supervise residents, I’ve met many people who were unnecessarily prescribed a cocktail of antidepressants by other clinicians in the community. Many of my colleagues have come across such patients too.

Even people who have chronic mild depression can respond well to antidepressants, some studies have found. But a 2010 meta-analysis showed that people with the most severe depression experienced the greatest improvement from antidepressant treatment, whereas the benefit for those with milder depression was smaller, in some cases near zero. One possible explanation for this finding is that placebo responses tend to be higher in patients with milder depression (perhaps because they start to feel better when researchers ask how they’re doing throughout the study), so drug-placebo differences in that group are slight. Another explanation is that people with more severe depression likely have more biological abnormalities in the brain, such as elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol and exaggerated responses in the fear circuit, which can be good targets for antidepressants.

No national data prove that antidepressant overuse is rampant, though. The closest approximation we have is a landmark 2014 study that examined the health records of more than 1 million patients during one year of treatment and found that about 40 percent of antidepressant prescriptions were written without a documented psychiatric diagnosis. This, however, doesn’t prove that the prescriptions were medically unnecessary: Antidepressants are legitimately prescribed for other reasons, including pain, quitting smoking, and insomnia. And the fact that nearly a fifth of Americans are taking an antidepressant is in line with the actual burden of psychiatric illness in the general population: In the most recent national data available, which were published in 2005, 7 percent of survey respondents reported having major depressive disorder, 4 percent reported PTSD, and others reported additional diagnoses for which SSRIs can be appropriate.

[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]

Of course, some patients don’t like being on antidepressants, even if they experience an improvement in their mood. A small proportion of SSRI users experience side effects such as decreased libido, weight gain, and tiredness. Although these effects can understandably be distressing, they are also commonly transient and manageable. If Kennedy’s efforts lead to widespread de-prescribing of antidepressants, it would be a potentially harmful overreaction to a limited problem.

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s focus on antidepressant overprescribing ignores—and may even deepen—a more urgent crisis in psychiatry. The 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that roughly one in three adults who experienced a major depressive episode received no treatment for their illness that year. Evidence suggests that several common barriers drive this undertreatment of depression: People don’t know where to go for help, think they can manage without help, or cannot afford help. In my experience, some depressed patients avoid treatment because they feel that a depression diagnosis is stigmatizing and connotes that they are weak rather than medically ill. The more doubts Kennedy and other officials instill about antidepressants, the more likely some people who really need them may be to turn them down. “The United States is facing a growing challenge of overmedicalization in behavioral health care,” Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, told The Atlantic in an email. “Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS is committed to ensuring that patients and clinicians have transparent information about the benefits, risks, side effects, and potential withdrawal effects of psychiatric medications so they can make informed, evidence-based treatment decisions.”

Depression is a serious illness, and discouraging people who need antidepressants from seeking them—or enacting policies that impede access to them—would only spur on its greatest harms. Roughly half of people who experience an episode of major depression will go on to have a chronic course of the illness. That means many patients cannot stop taking antidepressants without a significant risk of relapse or worse: Depression carries a lifetime suicide risk of about 2 to 9 percent, with more severe forms of the disease corresponding to higher risk. In this sense, depressed patients are dependent on their SSRIs in the same way that people with high blood pressure are dependent on their antihypertensive drugs. To mitigate the risk of fatal complications of the illness, you might have to stay on the treatment for life. That kind of dependency is something that competent clinicians and health-policy experts should encourage.

[Jeffrey Ruoff: Between not wanting to live and not wanting to die]

Kennedy, by contrast, has likened antidepressant dependence to heroin addiction. “Listen, I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than people have getting off heroin,” he told a Senate committee at his confirmation hearing last year. But the fact is that, unlike an opiate such as heroin, antidepressants do not make people high and do not result in habituation, which requires users to take ever-larger doses to maintain their clinical effect. And although research on tapering is somewhat limited, one of the largest available studies shows that any withdrawal symptoms tend to be mild and dissipate within weeks.

Kennedy’s desire to reduce Americans’ reliance on antidepressants fits in with his larger antipathy toward pharmaceuticals, especially vaccines. He generally seems to believe that eating and exercising well is all that is necessary for health. In the case of depression, he favors non-drug alternatives, such as psychotherapy, exercise, and “real food.” But I’ve seen many patients in exemplary physical health—for example, triathletes and serious swimmers who adhere to strict diets—become suicidally depressed. Taking an antidepressant after you have tried exercise, a healthy diet, and psychotherapy isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw. It’s a recognition that disease has an underlying biological basis—and that sometimes, you need medication to get better.

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To find any real sign of life at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts these days, you have to trek to the farthest edge of its 17-acre campus.

That’s where I found myself on a pleasant evening last week to catch the only performance scheduled that day at the nation’s once-premier cultural center. Trailing a set of latecomers, I snaked around the center’s facade (where, yes, Kennedy’s name is still tarped), down a path toward the Reach annex, and through its back doors before finally finding the music: a fusion of jazz and R&B drifting from the River Pavilion for dozens of people who filled the indoor-outdoor space. The last time I’d seen a sizable crowd outside the center, hundreds of protesters had amassed while construction workers set up to remove President Trump’s name from the building. And it had been longer, still, since I’d seen a crowd gathered for an actual performance.

As I took in the scene, my phone chimed with a message from a person working inside the main building: a photo capturing the enormous velvet-lined Hall of States, empty of activity. “Here’s the Kennedy Center tonight,” the person wrote. “We’re not doing much.” Other staffers have described the institution to me as a ghost town.

The Kennedy Center once drew some of the world’s most prominent acts, epitomizing Washington’s cosmopolitan ambitions. Since February 2025, however, it has been far better known for institutional turmoil under Trump than for performances taking place inside the complex. That drama culminated this May when a federal judge upended Trump’s efforts to remake the center, ordering the removal of his name and temporarily halting his plans to close the institution for a two-year renovation project that critics call unnecessary. Now, as the center’s leadership reconsiders a path forward, nearly every stage has gone dark for the foreseeable future. No opera (the Washington National Opera severed its affiliation). No musicals (touring shows book schedules months, if not years, ahead of time). No orchestra concerts (the resident symphony has been unable to announce its new season, further imperiling the ensemble’s financial health).

One exception remains. The long-running Millennium Stage has quietly held the line with free weekly events, carrying forward one of the center’s founding ideals: that performing arts should be accessible to everyone. At an institution where nearly everything else has been muted, the most enduring expression of what the Kennedy Center once was now lives on its smallest stage.

That’s by design, according to multiple people familiar with the program’s operations, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. The goal is to preserve a sense of continuity—to make it feel as though, despite everything else that’s happened under Trump, there’s still some art at the Kennedy Center. You just have to find the backyard to see it.

When Millennium Stage launched in 1997, Kennedy Center leaders saw it as a way to solve a problem that had dogged the institution since it opened in 1971: Too many people still viewed the nation’s performing-arts center as an intimidating marble monument for just the elite. Millennium Stage offered a different invitation. Each day at 6 p.m., for 365 days a year, anyone could walk in and watch a live performance for free.

The programming spans nearly every artistic discipline—jazz, hip-hop, theater, dance, classical music—and long-standing partnerships with embassies and community organizations helped shape the calendar. “Millennium Stage doesn’t have a genre,” one staffer told me. “It’s something different every day.”

[Read: The Kennedy Center’s latest defense raises a new mystery]

Some of the performances became as exciting as the shows in the center’s main theaters. One evening in 2003, the Colombian singer Juanes drew more than 6,000 fans—mostly of Latin descent, Michael Kaiser, the Kennedy Center’s president from 2001 to 2014, told me. “We were nervous that the fire marshal would shut us down because he was so huge a star, but not quite yet in America,” he said. Other nights featured Earl Scruggs, Patti LaBelle, the National Symphony Orchestra, or performances tied to major international festivals that spilled beyond the Kennedy Center’s ticketed theaters.

Millennium Stage was more than just a free concert series, Kaiser said. It offered tourists another uniquely Washington, D.C., experience after the Smithsonian museums closed for the day. Members of Congress routinely recommended it to constituents visiting Washington. And for many local residents who might never have purchased a ticket to a main-stage production, it became their front door to the institution itself. “I think particularly for those who weren’t going to buy a ticket or couldn’t buy a ticket, this was their link to the Kennedy Center,” Kaiser said.

The recent concert I attended—a performance by the local trumpeter Cyrus “Cy” Mackey and his band, Kenyatta—looked like an effortless, low-lift production. Crews fluidly worked the livestream cameras. A cashier manned a concession stand. Stagehands and security personnel directed guests to open seats. Behind the scenes, though, keeping these shows going requires a small army of planners, producers, and technicians. Artists are booked months in advance. Contracts are negotiated. The stage is configured.

When the Kennedy Center reopened in 2021 after closing during the pandemic, Millenium Stage went down to four concerts a week. Then came the Trump takeover. Under leaders installed by the president, the center saw severe staff layoffs, artist and audience boycotts, and more programming in line with political priorities. Along the way, Millennium Stage absorbed many of the same pressures facing the rest of the institution. Responsibilities that had once been divided among specialists were redistributed among a skeleton crew.

Scroll through the Kennedy Center’s event calendar, and it’s immediately clear how tenuously the institution is hanging on. Aside from Millennium Stage, the only other department producing programming is education, another staffer told me: art-studio sessions geared toward families.

The center hosted the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in late June, and its last big productions, Moulin Rouge and Bluey’s Big Play, had their final shows earlier this summer. The main drama has been in court. This week, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper set an August deadline for the Kennedy Center to provide an update on its plans for future construction and operations, as well as the status of the tarp and scaffolding still obscuring the building’s facade. But in the two months since Cooper’s May ruling, Kennedy Center leaders have not moved much closer to offering any clarity about its future. Board members last month voted to appeal Cooper’s ruling but have weighed in on little else so far. The upshot: The Kennedy Center cannot close right now. But it has entered near-stasis, like a dead mall that has just a couple of active storefronts. (An exhibit about President Kennedy is also still open, and volunteers are giving tours.)

Meanwhile, to maintain programming for Millennium Stage, quiet compromises have been made. Earlier this month, the schedule was pared back again—to two or three performances each week, plus a Saturday film screening—and the series moved from its longtime home in the Grand Foyer to the River Pavilion at the Reach, the Kennedy Center’s 2019 expansion along the Potomac River.

By law, the Kennedy Center has to serve as a presidential memorial and present artistic programming—a dual duty that Trump’s surprise plan to close down the center for renovations threatened. Matt Floca, the center’s executive director, testified in April that leaders were exploring options at the Reach so that the Kennedy Center could maintain artistic programming even if the main performance spaces are closed. As the institution’s newest addition, the Reach will likely be the home for any remaining programming this year, one of the staffers I spoke with told me.

Another task for Millennium Stage is rebuilding trust. “The center as a whole has done a lot of damage” to its relationships with artists, another staffer said. Some musicians and agents have quietly asked whether performing at the Kennedy Center is still worth it—or even whether it feels safe.

Notably, Yasmin Williams, an acclaimed fingerstyle guitarist who had been critical of the center’s new leadership, said she was heckled by Trump supporters while performing at Millennium Stage last September. At the time, she told me that she believed the jeering had been a coordinated effort to harass and intimidate her after she obtained an email from a Republican group that had encouraged its members to attend her show to “make sure the audience is filled with patriots!” There have not been any other public reports of politically charged disruptions at Millenium Stage events; a network of previously established relationships with local artists keeps the stage going. Friends recommend friends. Artists reassure other artists. Community, in many ways, has become the infrastructure filling the gaps in a hollowed-out institution.

The other part of Millennium Stage’s resilience is financial. Unlike many of the Kennedy Center’s programs, it is supported by separate endowment funding. As Kennedy Center leaders continue weighing what the institution will look like in the years ahead, the board has yet to settle on a long-term operating plan. But across all of the scenarios being discussed internally, Millennium Stage is widely expected to continue to operate, I was told.

Until then, every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evening, musicians still tune their instruments and families still wander in. Through it all, Millennium Stage seems to have maintained a core fan group. Mackey, the trumpeter I saw perform, told me he’s grateful the series brings in a diverse crowd. “I saw a lot of youth that were really connecting with the music,” he said. “I saw older ones really connecting with the music—people from different languages, different places.”

One attendee I spoke with after the show said he has been joining his friends and family for concerts every summer in the past few years. “Usually, we get together by the harbor,” Daniel Mariam told me as he sat in a lawn chair outside the pavilion—though sometimes, like on this night, he said, he is the only one from his group who shows up. “Every time there is a concert, I’m here.”

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Legal filings submitted by James Comey this week argue that the Trump administration has subjected the former FBI director to a vindictive and meritless prosecution. What stands out is how little effort the president put into pretending this is not the case.

President Trump first branded Comey a criminal more than eight years ago. In 2017, he took the then-shocking step of firing Comey before the expiration of his 10-year term. The following year, Trump wrote a Twitter post claiming, “James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did—until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted.”

Hampered by career public servants and political appointees who followed traditional democratic norms (refusing to prosecute people merely because the president hates them), Trump was unable to make good on this threat and settled mostly for tweeting out demands that Comey be imprisoned. During his second term, however, Trump has sought to bring criminal charges against apparently anybody who defies or displeases him. He has flexed this power by repeating his claims that Comey was a “dirty cop” who deserved prison, ordering the Justice Department to charge him with crimes, and orchestrating the entire plot in public view.

[Quinta Jurecic: The Comey indictment is an embarrassment]

Last year, Trump reportedly pressured the Justice Department to charge Comey. When the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, resigned rather than bring a meritless case, Trump’s Justice Department replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, an inexperienced Trump loyalist, who brought an indictment for lying to Congress (an allegation that was different from his first-term claims that Comey had leaked classified material). It was shortly dismissed when a judge found that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed.

Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring new charges and fired her for, among other reasons, failing to accomplish the task. He then replaced Bondi with another loyalist, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who duly produced another indictment, this time for the “crime” of threatening the president’s life by posting an Instagram photo of seashells on the beach spelling out “86 47.” Trump showed Blanche the man, and Blanche found the crime.

When Comey’s message appeared, Trump’s supporters depicted it as an endorsement of his murder, rather than his removal. Comey immediately removed the post and clarified his intentions, stating he opposed political violence. Trump has nevertheless insisted that “86,” a restaurant shorthand for canceling an order or ejecting a customer that has taken on a general meaning “to get rid of or discard,” must imply a call for presidential assassination.

Even if this implausible interpretation were correct, Comey’s message would not be a crime. Under the Supreme Court’s long-standing interpretation of the First Amendment, advocating violence against a public official, though morally reprehensible, is protected speech, as long as it does not constitute a specific incitement to immediate action. That is one reason that Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech urging an angry and armed crowd to “fight like hell” to overturn the election result could not be prosecuted.

The current charge against Comey, in short, relies on a tendentious interpretation of an innocuous term combined with a disregard for the First Amendment in order to gin up charges against a man Trump has been targeting openly for nearly a decade.

Although Trump has done little to disguise his intentions, it would be untrue to say he put zero effort into the pretense. He did attempt to keep one of his instructions to Bondi private—a September 20, 2025, message on Truth Social to his then–attorney general stating, “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” and concluding, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

However, Trump mistakenly posted this direct message to his public account, making it visible to all of his followers.

[Quinta Jurecic: The ‘presumption of regularity’ is evaporating]

Trump’s incompetence throughout this vendetta against Comey is perhaps its most welcome aspect. The episode reveals the formidable powers available to a president to target his enemies. Comey’s filing alleges that, in addition to Trump’s previously known directives to the Justice Department to prosecute his target, the president used the Secret Service to investigate him.

The agency, which is charged with protecting the president, not only began following Comey, but tracked his location through his phone. This step legally requires law enforcement to believe there is “an imminent threat to life or limb,” which Comey’s retracted seashell message obviously did not constitute.

One Secret Service official wrote in a memo, MS NOW reports, “At the time we did not believe anyone’s life was in danger and legally it was a bad idea.” But after a top Justice Department official demanded this action, the Secret Service relented. The difference between security agencies in democracies and secret-police forces is that the former have to obey laws and not just follow the whims of the head of state. The Secret Service’s actual procedures turn out to be more like guidelines that can be discarded if the president is sufficiently angry—which, from the standpoint of safeguarding democracy, constitutes a fairly concerning loophole.

Not for the first time, the president’s clumsiness is likely to negate his malevolence, though not without considerable cost, in time and money, to Comey. Yet Trump’s incompetence is also unsettling. This president may be succeeded by someone who equals Trump in his eagerness to wield the office’s powers and in his lack of scruples, but exceeds him in intelligence and discipline. Future plots to imprison a critic of the MAGA movement might not be undermined by a loudmouth president who can’t help but give away the scheme.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article with the headline “Slow Down, Charli XCX.” The pop singer had followed a hit album, 2024’s Brat, with a steady pulse of output—a remix album, a soundtrack album, a host of movie roles, plus many, many marketing stunts—that had me exhausted by someone whom I consider to be one of the most exciting voices in music. Quantity was beating quality; good enough was smushing great.

Five months later, a new Charli XCX album has arrived, with all of the memes and metacommentary that tend to swirl around music’s most online star. It’s called Music, Fashion, Film, and it was conceived in what she’s described as a burst of inspiration during last fall’s Paris Fashion Week. With a spiky and Scotch-taped sound, the album is a 30-minute broadside against overthinking the artistic process. In direct challenge to those who feel she’s saturated the market (I’m not the only one), she’s rallying for an idea that feels very now but really is also very old: More is more.

Love songs to the muse abound. “Yeah, we’re so inspired / basically all the time,” she sings on the opener, titled “Rock Music,” whose glitch-kissed analog instrumentation and lyrical logorrhea announce the album’s sound and attitude. “Camera” celebrates the sheer terror of acting by comparing the director’s lens to a gun; “Magic Metal Montana” narrates recording-studio-forged friendship while cutesy New Wave riffs percolate. The album closes with a monologue from the director David Cronenberg, who preaches that long-term legacy really can’t be the artist’s concern. His implication is that what matters is what you do in this lifetime—so get to doing it.

Charli is known for making self-aware, cybernetic dance pop—the art-school take on Britney Spears—but this album most flagrantly calls back to a rock band: the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed modeled the sort of petulant sing-talking that characterizes her verses. The album’s producers, A. G. Cook and Finn Keane, have made a digital drag-and-drop collage of the Velvets’ ingredients: tinny guitars evoking 1970’s radio-rock foray, Loaded; metronomic beats in the lineage of the band’s sparse and steady timekeeper, Moe Tucker. Sitting next to Martin Scorsese and the designer Marc Jacobs on the album cover is the group’s multi-instrumentalist John Cale, rock’s god of noisy, dignified experimentation.

Comparisons to the Velvet Underground recontextualize Charli’s career in a useful way. By courting the charts while pulling from the avant-garde, she’s long been at the center of the tiresome debate over “poptimism,” an alleged cultural turn toward valuing easy gratification over difficulty in art. But the Velvets were sneering at the false dichotomy between those things back in the ’60s. Yes, Cale droned with dread, and Reed sang of scandalous topics (I wish Charli and other leading songwriters of her generation held his social-documentarian instincts—rather than fixating on the person in the mirror). But Reed was also a bubblegum fan who sought hits. He shared the ambition Charli sings about on the sterling Music, Fashion, Film B-side “Playboy Bunny”: to make a song as memorable as the canonical smut mag’s logo.  

[Read: A very pretentious form of propaganda]

A few tracks here might indeed rate as future classics. With serene guitars and unnervingly beautiful vocals referencing the malaise of doomscrolling, “SS26” glides from the speakers like some chiffon-clad horseman of the apocalypse (“Spring, summer ’26 / When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it”). The sludgy, distorted “Card Declined” well captures the existential futility of a shopping binge. “Yeah” is a brilliantly simple distillation of the creative process in which Charli mumbles “I don’t wanna” a bunch—until she changes her mind. Surf-rock riffs, punctuated with pockets of silence, eventually slacken in tempo for a glorious, slo-mo finish. The track has a complete thesis about the ups and downs of art making, articulated almost entirely in sound.

Generally, the more words in a song here, the worse it is. Charli’s aiming for sprezzatura, but of course that’s not something you can aim for—and many of the results feel like careless rambling. On the otherwise-delightful, fuzzed-out “Wink Wink,” a line in the first verse is as unpleasant as gristly steak: “And maybe I fucked your dad / Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect.” Meanwhile, the sweetly nostalgic “2007” is slightly undercooked: “All from your apartment, you can shine bright like”—and here the brain craves some twist—“a star.” The most personal tracks on the album are convoluted yet bland, like the recounting of uninteresting dreams. “Magic Metal Montana” salutes her producer Cook, but her descriptions are superficial—as if Charli doesn’t really know him.

With their unusual production style and intriguing subject matter, many of these songs point to far better versions of themselves. Is it churlish to ask for more oomph, more insight, more effort? The album’s cover seems to answer that question by featuring three masters of modern media who are known for being prolific. Jacobs used to put out 16 fashion lines a year. Scorsese’s all-over-the-place 1980s output was criticized as inconsistent at the time, but fans have come to appreciate The King of Comedy and After Hours. Cale will always be thought of as a genius even if few listened to, say, 2024’s Poptical Illusion. These men create simply because creating is what they do—and audiences have been lucky that’s so.

Charli has every right to take heed from that model. But the artists she’s channeling are icons of a 20th-century paradigm now destroyed by overproduction. After the internet made creation, distribution, and consumption of media into frictionless affairs, pop culture seemed to become swamped: so much content, so few classics. Cronenberg is right that artists need not create with posterity in mind, but for a contemporary oracle such as Charli, the concerns of the present do merit consideration. And the great concern, right now, is too much mediocrity.

Photographs by Dana Golan

Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair. An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales. Young boys, schoolbags on their backs, stood on a far corner and watched.

I walked around the block to the Hoa Mai playground, named for a Vietnamese flower that signifies rebirth. City workers had installed gates to keep drug users away, but at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, I counted 27 people smoking drugs and nodding off. No children were in sight.

Half a mile to the south, in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, I visited a 10-acre park named after the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal. It has a playground and the remnants of an apple orchard, and at night you can peer downtown and see the city lights. As I arrived, a drug user squatted next to a child’s slide and relieved himself. Others had set up tents and colonized the park pavilion, where they heated fentanyl on tinfoil and inhaled the fumes with glass pipes. A few went old-school and injected it.

Across the street, I spoke with Angelina Monsegur as she waited at a bus stop. When she was a kid, she told me, she and her father ate candied apples in the park and watched Fourth of July fireworks. A few weeks earlier, she and her 6-year-old daughter had gotten on the bus and seen a man smoking fentanyl on board. “Are you serious?” she’d shouted at him. “My daughter has asthma.” I asked if she had called the police, and she smiled at my naivete. “All the city does is send out teams who hand out aluminum foil and fentanyl pipes.”

Seattle is one of the wealthiest and best-educated cities in the world. It can afford to try various strategies to address its drug epidemic and high rate of fatal overdoses. Yet many of the city’s leaders, apparently supported by voters, view enforcing bans on the open sale and use of narcotics, and forcing addicts off the streets and into treatment, as akin to an act of state repression.

Seattle, like a striking number of other liberal American cities, has embraced a radical form of “harm reduction,” which is more a philosophy about treating addiction than a scientific approach to it. Harm reduction’s adherents hold that police and outreach workers should “meet the addicted where they are,” which is to say without judgment. The New York State Department of Health, a bastion of harm reduction, describes it as a “social movement” committed to “building leadership” among drug users. In these places, de facto and sometimes legal restrictions on narcotics use have been greatly loosened; cities fund teams of workers to hand out drug paraphernalia, and in some rare cases they’ve created dedicated spaces for addicts to shoot up. Meanwhile, police departments struggling with staffing shortages and budget cuts have stopped devoting resources to sweeping users and dealers off the streets or out of parks and playgrounds.

Harm reduction was born 50 years ago of an admirable humanitarian impulse. Its most basic ideas, such as providing clean needles to users, deservedly draw broad support. There’s a debate to be had, though, about whether this approach has saved lives or added to the carnage of America’s terrible drug epidemic. From 2014 to 2024, roughly 862,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, more than twice the toll of the previous decade. Several studies have shown that addicts who shoot up at official injection sites are far less likely to die of overdoses than those who use drugs in, say, alleyways and parks. Over the past decade, however, overdose-death rates climbed sharply in nearly every city where the strongest harm-reduction policies were in place, and even with declines in the past two years, the rates remain well above those of previous decades. From 2016 to 2025, 7,089 people died of overdoses in King County, which includes Seattle—seven times the number of homicides in that period.

Harm reduction isn’t just a problem for addicts. In many cities, the autonomy of drug users has taken precedence over nearly everything and everyone else, not least working-class families like Monsegur’s who must live alongside addicts and accept dystopian decay. Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry and behavioral-sciences professor and a former adviser to President Obama, supports needle exchanges and opposes the widespread jailing of users. But when he argues that drug policy must take into account the impact on communities, he told me, some critics dismiss him as a reactionary. Their arguments, he said, “sound a lot more like gun rights and vaccine refusal. It’s no longer about the whole population; it’s about the subset who use drugs.”

In recent years, officials in cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia have moved to rein in the excesses of harm-reduction policies. Nevertheless, these policies retain a powerful hold on public-health and political leaders in blue parts of the country. I witnessed this in visits to Seattle and Burlington, Vermont—two of America’s more progressive cities. Both are afflicted by high overdose rates, overwhelmed police forces, parks and public squares often captive to drug use, and the theft and disorder that accompany all of that. Yet many of their elected officials continue to insist, despite everything, that harm reduction is the most effective and moral solution to addiction.

[Listen: Can San Francisco be saved?]

Harm reduction took root in the 1970s in the Netherlands, where addicts formed unions—the Junkiebond in Rotterdam, for instance—that distributed needles and pushed back against official insistence on abstinence from hard drugs. Not long afterward, this philosophy gained support in some American and Canadian cities. I first encountered it when I reported on a heroin-shooting gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 1991. The work of harm-reduction advocates at the time undoubtedly saved lives. HIV-infection rates for drug users in Bushwick had reached 50 percent or higher, at a time when that diagnosis was close to a death sentence. Activists risked arrest to distribute clean needles and bleach to disinfect used ones. But some began to argue for a more radical step: There would be less death, they said, if addicts could inject drugs without fear of arrest.

That momentous step came about not in New York but in Vancouver, a city whose political culture was left-wing and libertarian, celebrating the rights of the individual. In 2003, as overdose deaths surged, the Liberal Party of Canada carved out an exemption to federal drug laws and established North America’s first sanctioned injection site, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a troubled dockside neighborhood. Addicts could bring their heroin and cocaine to a 13-seat center where staff dispensed needles, swabs, and sterile water to cook the drugs and offered advice on vein maintenance. Clinic staff were trained to reverse overdoses, and if that failed, to call a hospital for help.

Initial opinion surveys found broad public support for the center, and it shone like a beacon for some activists, academics, and journalists in the United States and other parts of Canada. A stream of studies and articles celebrated Vancouver’s legal shooting gallery, which resulted in fewer cases of AIDS and other infections, and fewer deaths. Public-health officials coined a nonjudgmental nomenclature that persists to this day. The word addict was stigmatizing; better to refer to people who use drugs. People used rather than abused narcotics. They did not fail a drug test ; they tested positive.

Vancouver’s model spawned dozens of injection sites across Canada. Health officials in British Columbia went still further, championing a program known as “safer supply”: Former government officials started companies that provided addicts with free opioid alternatives such as pharmaceutical-grade hydromorphone pills—considerably more powerful than heroin. Drug users obtained these pills from pharmacies and specially designed vending machines.

By 2020, the rights of addicts in the province had edged toward the fantastical. In 2023, the province decriminalized small amounts of certain hard drugs. One hospital instructed nurses not to confiscate fentanyl or meth from patients and not to restrict suspected dealers from visiting patients. When British Columbia banned illicit-drug use within 50 feet of a public park, playground, or swimming pool, the provincial supreme court blocked the law, ruling that it could cause “irreparable harm” to drug users. “Harm reductionists had the force of a bulldozer,” Julian Somers, who studies addiction at Simon Fraser University, told me.

Some addicts learned to game the system by obtaining daily allotments of hydromorphone pills—15 or more a day was typical—and then selling them to dealers in exchange for stronger fentanyl concoctions. Dealers could then sell the original pills on the street. An investigation by the National Post reported a price drop of 70 percent or more for black-market pills in cities that had instituted safer supply. This, in turn, expanded the circle of the addicted and led to more overdoses.

The consequences were predictable. Over the course of two decades, many thousands of drug users poured into the Downtown Eastside and other Canadian neighborhoods in search of narcotics and places to shoot up. Overdoses spiked. In 2014, British Columbia recorded 369 overdose deaths; in 2023, the figure peaked at more than 2,500. Fatal overdoses last year decreased to 1,826, as Canada moved to reverse decriminalization and tighten regulation of narcotics, but that still represents a nearly ninefold increase over 15 years. Advocates of harm reduction have long held that more addicts would die if officials closed injection centers. But a recent study found that after an injection site in Alberta closed, there was no increase in the number of overdose deaths, and more addicts sought treatment. Advocates have also insisted that crime does not spike near injection centers, but the data are more mixed than they admit.

Not long ago, I walked through a park in Toronto to a fence with hundreds of purple ribbons tied to it. Each represented a resident who had died of an overdose, and I was unavoidably moved. Then, as I read a leaflet, I realized that the memorial was the work of the Harm Reduction Advocacy Collective, “a liberation movement of people who use drugs,” along with public-health professionals and academics who “stand up for the rights of drug users.” It’s one of a number of similar groups in Canada, such as the Substance Use Health Network, which condemns “anti-euphoria prohibitionist principles” such as “the idea that illicit drugs are inherently bad.”

British Columbia is starting to rethink its runaway experiment. In 2025, the province began requiring addicts using the safer-supply program to consume their prescribed narcotics in front of pharmacists, and earlier this year, the drug-decriminalization program expired. Provincial health authorities are now making attempts to encourage addicts to get treatment. The sense is of a political culture reluctantly shaking off a decades-long stupor. In 2024, the premier of British Columbia appointed Daniel Vigo, a psychiatrist and public-health researcher, as the province’s chief scientific adviser on toxic drugs. Vigo has spoken of the terrible toll that repeat overdoses take on addicts’ brains, and has advocated for a new policy of mandating treatment for some addicts. Progressive activists and journalists tend to talk about forced treatment as a conservative-driven return to a carceral state, but considerable data show that addicts who enter mandated treatment are as likely to avoid drug use and rearrest as the relatively small number who seek treatment voluntarily.

Vigo’s words today would have amounted to heresy a few years ago. “It’s as if we forgot that the goal was to try and stop people from getting addicted,” he told me, adding later: “Harm reduction gets people in trouble when it stops being one part of a holistic strategy and it becomes an ideological movement.”

But even as Vancouver has begun the painful process of revising its harm-reduction policies, the city still exerts a powerful hold on the imagination of liberal leaders in the United States. In New York City, which established two injection sites in 2021, health officials and academics point to the perceived success of Vancouver as inspiration. Rhode Island, where an injection center opened in Providence in 2024, also holds up Vancouver as a model. The Washington State legislature appointed a working group that in 2025 recommended establishing a safe supply of narcotics for addicts, and officials repeatedly cited the Vancouver program.

The shadow cast by Vancouver extends to Burlington. Last year, the city council approved the establishment of an injection center. The group that the city chose to run it noted that Vancouver “remains the source of much of the evidence” showing the benefits of such spaces for drug users and the community.

Burlington sits on Lake Champlain, the Adirondack Mountains rising on the far shore. It’s a beautiful city, but its drug scene is not covert, spreading over downtown and several other neighborhoods. Users pitch tents in churchyards and parks and along the waterfront. When I sat in City Hall Park last September, I counted at least 70 users and dealers, many looking hyperkinetic in the way of the strung out. I walked through an alley next to city hall where, a few weeks earlier, a group of young people had allegedly beaten a man to death in an argument over drugs.

Vermont has strict laws against possession of heroin and cocaine, but users in Burlington are rarely arrested or prosecuted for possessing small amounts. Although it’s hard to isolate the effects of these policies, in 2024, the city of almost 45,000 recorded 585 drug overdoses, 28 of which were fatal. That is more than twice the rate of fatal overdoses per capita in New York City the same year.

Beth Sightler walked me around her working-class neighborhood in the Old North End. Burlington’s progressive political culture and tradition of caring for the poor are well established; Bernie Sanders served four terms as mayor in the 1980s. Sightler, a liberal who runs a mental-health center, said she has fished needles out of her flower boxes and seen people overdosing in cars and cemeteries. She carries naloxone, a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose, when she walks her dog. One morning she saw a young woman on the grass near her porch wearing underwear, a bra, and sandals. “There was this beautiful woman, absolutely beautiful, sitting there trying to find a vein and inject,” Sightler recalled. “I told her, ‘Sweetie, you gotta move along.’”

Many people in Burlington offer similar stories. A block from City Hall Park, the King Street Center provides tutoring and recreation programs for families living in poverty. Staff members arrive early to sweep up needles outside the building. When drug dealers began playing dice out front last summer, Shabnam Nolan, the executive director, called the police, who eventually chased the dealers away. “We’ve tried to sound the alarm, and yet people are not taking us seriously enough about what’s happening,” Nolan told me. Why does a drug user’s “right to ‘dignity’ violate children’s right to come to our center without seeing blood and needles?”

“It’s as if,” she said of Burlington and its culture, “we are frozen with fear that someone might see us as uncompassionate.”

The city’s political class has compounded these problems. In 2020, activists launched a campaign to defund the police department, although it was regarded as relatively progressive and community-oriented. The city council cut almost $1 million from the police budget. Six years ago, Burlington had about 100 officers; now it has fewer than 70. The current city-council president, Ben Traverse, a liberal Democrat who has grown uncomfortable with Burlington’s direction, told me that sometimes as few as five officers are on duty citywide after midnight on the weekends. It used to be that if you wanted to deal drugs, “you did not come to Burlington,” Traverse said. But that’s changed: “Open-air drug sales are a common occurrence here.”

State’s Attorney Sarah George, the prosecutor for the county that includes Burlington, is a progressive Democrat who once wrote that the American legal system “was built on the oppression and caging of black, brown, and poor people.” She told me that the combination of COVID, ever less affordable housing, and a cascade of evictions fed a drug crisis that has devastated Vermont. But she doesn’t blame addicts, who she said are “rarely dangerous” and are suffering. “I’m very frustrated with this narrative that City Hall Park is the end of the world,” George added. “That park is still a very safe place to be.”

I asked her how Burlington might balance drug users’ sometimes dominant presence in the city’s parks and streets with the desire of residents to use and enjoy those same places. The city, she replied, should start by opening its planned injection center so that addicts can use drugs in private. The state legislature has allocated about $2 million that it obtained from a national opioid settlement to help fund the center, though potential neighbors have pushed back against the sites that have been floated so far. More broadly, George opposes pushing addicts to the margins. “They cannot be disappeared,” she said. “They are part of our community.”

In 2022, George announced a new policy: If police officers stopped cars with broken taillights, tinted windows, or expired licenses and found a cache of narcotics, her office would most likely decline to prosecute the cases, on the grounds that racial discrimination could have motivated the traffic stops. She emphasized to me that police officers could in any case confiscate and destroy the drugs. But she questioned the need to go beyond that. “Is prosecution needed?” she said. “Or have we done enough already?” George has been reelected twice and is running for a third term.

In April, I spoke with Burlington’s mayor, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, of the Vermont Progressive Party, which has governed the city for much of the past four decades. She has seen firsthand the effects of the drug epidemic. When she lived in the Old North End and her child was a toddler, they awoke to drug dealers beating on their door. She told me that she supports police and Drug Enforcement Administration investigations that target dealers, although she noted the “whack-a-mole” nature of that work, as new dealers replace those who are arrested. She said that without more help from the county and state, the city lacks the funds to build larger shelters that could help keep addicts off the streets. She is aware that Burlingtonians have grown impatient living with a drug-abuse epidemic. “We are fatigued with our compassion,” she told me. “All of the attention on harm reduction and public health—I get that.”

But, like George, Mulvaney-Stanak has not backed away from harm-reduction policies that she sees as humane and essential. Last summer, she opposed a city-council resolution calling for police officers to be stationed in City Hall Park to clear out users and dealers, arguing that the drug traffic would only go elsewhere and that there were not enough officers to enforce the policy. She signed off on the resolution, but she shares George’s philosophical objections: “Displacement and removal of people is not the solution,” the mayor said.

Wouldn’t an injection center, I asked her, draw more addicts and dealers to Burlington? She acknowledged the possibility, but framed it as a necessary risk. She repeated the harm-reduction maxim: “It helps people where they are at.” The city’s problems, Mulvaney-Stanak insisted, were more image than reality: “People need to ignore the clickbaity articles that distort the nature of Burlington.”

Recently, Traverse and other Democrats on the city council have begun to challenge the mayor on harm reduction. Jennifer Morrison, the state’s public-safety commissioner, has also spoken up. She served as Burlington’s interim police chief for six months in 2020 before quitting, in part because of what she described as the city’s “mismanagement” and “social activism.” She and Governor Phil Scott, a moderate Republican, have clashed with Mulvaney-Stanak. They have periodically, at the city’s request, sent state troopers to Burlington to help local police with drug enforcement and patrolling the central business district. “I lived through the decisions that got us to the place that we are now,” Morrison told me. “We are exposing our youth to terrible consequences by normalizing drug use and addiction.”

The business community in Burlington has also pushed back. In more than a dozen interviews, local merchants spoke of feeling abandoned. In testimony before the state legislature, the owner of Outdoor Gear Exchange reported that in 2024, the business lost an estimated $400,000 to shoplifting, as addicts stole to support their habit. At Homeport, a 40-year-old home-furnishings store downtown, a co-owner, Mark Bouchett, told me that he lost $95,000 to shoplifting in 2024 and was forced to hire a security guard. Drug users defecate in the doorways of businesses.

Bouchett joined 170 other business owners and restaurateurs who last year wrote an open letter to the mayor warning that the city was in crisis. Their tone was reasonable; they sought treatment for addicts, not incarceration. But a broad coalition of the political left in Burlington—unions, harm-reduction groups, pro-Palestine and trans-rights activist groups, and the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America—countered with their own letter, in which they denounced the business owners and demanded that they open bathrooms and sheltered doorways to addicts. To call for more police to help address the city’s drug problem, this group wrote, would “further harm our most vulnerable community members.” One of the signatories, Food Not Cops Burlington, posted and then deleted a boycott map targeting the business owners.

Overdose deaths in Vermont dropped last year to 170, a 37 percent decrease from the peak in 2022, but still far above the 78 deaths recorded in 2010. At the Ben & Jerry’s on Church Street, I saw staff hand out cards to customers who asked to use the bathroom: “Vermont is experiencing a tragic increase in overdose fatalities. Our bathroom has also become a destination for folks seeking to inject drugs.” The bathroom was permanently locked.

Families and children speak of being left on their own to navigate these harsh realities. Through the King Street Center, I met a young woman who was earning top grades at the University of Vermont. When she walks her younger sisters home from school, they pass drug dealers on the way. A Burlington High School student told me that her teachers have instructed students to avoid eye contact with dealers and users. A week earlier, she said, an addict had trailed her home after volleyball practice. She broke into a run, yelling for help, and the person eventually turned away.

Then there was Britany, a mother of three young children, who moved two years ago from a homeless shelter to an apartment on King Street. (She asked me not to use her last name, fearing for her family’s safety.) She said that she often found drug paraphernalia in the apartment building and, on some nights, encountered an addict sleeping in the hallway; her next-door neighbor was a fentanyl dealer. She had constructed a safe room for her children to flee to in case of gunfire. “Everyone talks about needle exchange and harm reduction,” she said. “I mean, okay. But it’s like my children and I are living in the zombie apocalypse.”

Just a few years ago, voters in Seattle seemed primed for a change. In 2021, they elected Ann Davison, a moderate and independent-minded Republican, as city attorney. Sara Nelson, a Democrat who had advertised her willingness to challenge the harm-reduction consensus, won a seat on the city council the same year and became its president two years later. With support from Davison, she passed laws cracking down on open drug use, prostitution, and dealing downtown, and substantially increasing the number of surveillance cameras in high-crime neighborhoods. Nelson persuaded the city council to redirect money to on-demand addiction treatment. “You can’t meet people where they’re at, because where they’re at is on death’s door,” she told me, adding that she believes many addicts can be saved only by a firm push toward treatment.

Nelson also asked pointed questions about what had become the received wisdom in Seattle, such as why the county government paid millions of dollars to supply kits to addicts with tinfoil, pipes, and instructions on how to smoke fentanyl. (Incongruously, these kits came emblazoned with an image of Martin Luther King Jr., the namesake of King County.) What harm was reduced, Nelson asked at a 2023 council hearing, by helping addicts get high? Amber Tejada, an employee of a health nonprofit that had partnered with the city, raised her hand to answer. “I know it can be a little controversial,” she told the councilwoman, “but one of the key tenets of harm reduction that I see is that we want to be able to facilitate and champion autonomy of people who use drugs.” Tejada added, “There are folks for whom abstinence is not something by which they measure their success in life.”

Nelson was no hard-line conservative. She pushed to expand the number of treatment beds for addicts and talked openly of her own past struggles with alcohol. But in elections last November, voters turned out both her and Davison. Their replacements had concerns over the use of surveillance cameras and opposed laws that barred repeat public drug users from certain areas in the city. I spoke with Davison in her office shortly before her term was up. She wrestled with her sense of a job not completed. “It’s really sad to watch the slow death of so many people,” she said, adding later, “You cannot act like this is a victimless crime.”

[Read: Crime in Chicago is a choice]

I asked Sandeep Kaushik, a Democratic political consultant who has lived in Seattle for decades, if he could explain the persistent attraction of radical harm-reduction policies in his city. Kaushik described himself as an “unreconstructed Obama Democrat,” which he noted “codes me as a conservative in some circles here.” He told me that local leaders “really believe the city should be on the leading edge of translating progressive ideas into policy.” There is also a curious disconnect between the policies that political leaders put in place and the desires of voters. In many polls, Seattle residents list crime and illegal drug use as among their greatest concerns, and a Seattle Times survey three years ago found that 60 percent of respondents wanted police to arrest those who used drugs in public places.

Last year, the city elected a new mayor, Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist with no experience in elected office. Wilson has signaled an openness to pulling back some harm-reduction policies. Before she officially entered the race, she wrote an essay for Seattle’s alt-weekly, The Stranger, in which she cautioned fellow leftists against smugness. “The central weakness of the left narrative,” she wrote, “is a habit of deflection that makes it sound, at best, as though we are in denial about the grim reality on the streets.” The left, she continued, should not trivialize “what anyone who spends some time walking around Seattle’s streets can plainly observe: People with acute mental illness whose behavior is disturbed and occasionally aggressive. People using drugs, often incapacitated or passed out on the ground.”

Since she took office, Wilson has backed up her words by signing off on sweeps of large encampments in parks. Police and city workers have dismantled tents and carted away garbage. In late June, the mayor emerged from what she described in a statement as a period of “deep listening” and promised to “disrupt the drug dealing” and “public disorder” that plague the city’s Little Saigon and Beacon Hill neighborhoods. The police, she said, would commit more officers to those areas, and arrest users and dealers or press them to accept treatment. For a Seattle politician to argue that tolerating drug crime and disorder amounts to harm enhancement registered as something close to startling news.

Yet Wilson runs a political risk. By pledging to crack down, she has broken with many of her allies and supporters. Now she will be judged by her ability to clear the city’s streets. Andrea Suarez leads a group, We Heart Seattle, that combines care for the homeless with a hardheaded insistence on legal consequences and addiction treatment for drug users. She was in Jose Rizal Park when police swept it one day in April, and watched users and dealers amble off into the woods or walk over to Little Saigon. They returned a few hours later, she told me. A day or two after that, the tents reappeared. “Everyone who lives in this park knows there is no consequence for being swept multiple times or doing drugs or vandalizing a park,” Suarez said.

What’s baffling is that none of this lies beyond the ability of city officials to address. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has instructed police to crack down on dealers and dismantle tent cities. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker has sent officers into drug-scarred neighborhoods and established a treatment court, which offers first-time felony drug offenders a chance to avoid jail if they enter a treatment program. San Jose, California, has put more police officers in targeted neighborhoods, built emergency housing as police dismantle homeless encampments, and increased fines for landlords whose abandoned buildings are used by dealers to sell drugs and guns. In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu was once enamored of harm reduction and injection centers. But she has ordered police to clear street encampments, and her administration now puts more emphasis on pushing addicts into treatment, by detaining them if necessary. Wu has also dropped all mention of injection centers from her plans.

In Seattle, by contrast, efforts to reduce public drug use force afflicted neighborhoods to pay a high price. For years, when playgrounds and parks became drug hot spots, the city reacted by fencing them off, depriving families of access. In May, police and city workers returned to Jose Rizal Park and again booted out dealers and addicts, preparing the park for a renovation. As a first step, city workers dismantled the picnic pavilion where addicts smoked and shot up, its condition having deteriorated from all the misuse. Park officials do not plan on replacing it, acknowledging the obvious in bureaucratese: The park “has been impacted by activities not aligned with intended use.” The bus shelter around the corner, where drug users gathered day and night, was also ripped out “because of an increase in loitering, littering and vandalism,” a King County Metro representative told me by email. All of this felt like another admission of defeat—officials destroying Seattle in the name of saving it.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs.”

The first idea of a genuine talking-machine appears to belong to Thomas A. Edison, who, in 1875, took out patents upon a device intended to reproduce complex sounds, such as those of the human voice. Of the thousands of persons who in that year visited the small room in the Tribune building, in New York, where the first phonograph was for months on exhibition, very few were found to hope much for the invention. It was apparently a toy of no practical value; its talking was more or less of a caricature upon the human voice, and only when one knew what had been said to the phonograph could its version be understood.

Edison’s early phonograph nevertheless contained every essential feature of the new instruments which he and other inventors are about to introduce. It was founded upon the discovery that if a delicate diaphragm or sounding-board is provided with a sharp point of steel, its vibrations under the sound of the human voice will cause the sharp point or stylus to make a series of impressions or indentations upon a sheet of wax or other material passed beneath it. Such indentations, though microscopic, are sufficiently defined to cause similar vibrations in the diaphragm, if the stylus is again passed over the furrow of indentations, and this reproduction is loud enough to be heard.

Thus the phonograph in its rudest form consists of a little sounding-board, carrying on its under side a needle-point, and a sheet of wax so held as just to touch the needle. The sound waves of the voice cause the sounding-board with its needle-point to vibrate with a rapidity varying with the pitch of the note. If the wax sheet is moved slowly along while talk is going on, the result is a line of minute indentations. So far there is nothing surprising about the apparatus. But at the end of a line across the wax sheet raise the diaphragm, and put it back to the beginning of the line, causing the point to travel again over the same line of indentations. Listen carefully, and a repetition of the original sounds spoken or sung into the apparatus will be heard, strong or weak, distinct or indistinct, according to the perfection of the instrument. Tin-foil sheets were first used to receive the impression; they were placed on a cylinder, which was turned slowly by hand, in front of the vibrating diaphragm. While the cylinder carrying the foil had a rotary motion, it also moved from right to left, so that the line of dots or indentations made by the stylus formed a spiral running around the cylinder.

The defects of the early phonograph were so great that Edison found it impossible to interest capitalists in perfecting it. It reproduced singing and whistling with wonderful accuracy, but as a talker it was merely a curiosity. As such it was exhibited throughout the country, and the few hundreds then made soon found their way into college laboratories and museums. Edison went to work at his electric light. At the same time there were not wanting eminent men in Europe who predicted great things for the phonograph of the future.

What it accomplished was so wonderful that inventors would certainly be tempted to work over it. The perfect and practical phonograph might be due to a dozen men, each of whom should contribute something. One day it would be found a useful and most wonderful help to man. Edison himself has always stoutly maintained this view. More than a score of times, during the last ten years, he has said to me, “I wish I had leisure to work at my phonograph. When I get rich I will astonish the world with it.” He tells me that whenever disheartened for the moment over difficulties connected with his electric-light system, his mind would revert to the phonograph. For years he kept a special note-book in his pocket in which to jot down ideas concerning the invention, suggestions as to future experiments, etc. Two years ago he found himself in a position to take it up again.

In the mean time several other inventors and workers had done something to simplify the problem. Mr. Graham Bell, of telephone fame, has made phonographs of far greater delicacy than any of the original instruments, while in England some noted experimenters have succeeded in doing wonders in the way of delicate apparatus. Mr. Edison took up the work where these had left off. In place of a sheet of tin-foil a sheet of prepared wax was adopted. The steel needle-point was retained for indenting the sheet, but for reproducing the sound it was found that an elastic splinter of bamboo, as fine as a hair, answered the purpose better, and made so little impression upon the wax as not to wear off its record. In place of a hand-crank to turn the cylinder an electric motor was introduced. Finally all parts of the machine were made with a delicacy and care not thought of ten years ago. In the old phonograph the attempt was to make a loud noise, and this was accomplished at the expense of distinctness of articulation. If the voice of the perfected phonograph is as loud as that of a telephone, the result will be satisfactory, provided it is perfectly distinct.

Edison has devoted nearly two years to the task of making the phonograph of commercial use. He believes that he has succeeded. Whether or not the instrument shall enter into every-day life, as the telephone has done, is a question for the future. Certainly it is now a far greater wonder than it was in 1875, and it has reached a point where it cannot again be dropped by the scientific world. Whether Mr. Edison, or Mr. Bell, or some one else puts the final touches which will take the apparatus out of the laboratory and make it practical for common use does not much matter. Some one will certainly do it. Those persons who smile incredulously when it is said that the perfected phonograph will do away with letter-writing, will read to us, will sing and play for us, will give us books, music, plays, speeches, at almost no cost, and become a constant source of instruction and amusement, must have forgotten the ridicule they heaped upon the rumor that an American inventor proposed to talk from New York to Chicago. The achievements of the phonograph will at best be less wonderful than those of the telephone.

It has been my privilege to follow pretty closely the evolution of the phonograph under Mr. Edison’s hands, and also to study the graphophone of Mr. Bell. A brief account of one apparatus will answer for both, as they are identical in essentials. The new phonograph takes up, with its table, about the space occupied by a sewing-machine, and might at first be taken for one. Underneath the table is an electric battery or a treadle, according to the power used in moving the cylinder. The wax cylinders, or phonograms, as they are called, are two inches in diameter, and vary in length from one to ten inches, according to the amount of talking which is to be engraved upon them. The smallest size is about that of a napkin ring, and will be sufficient for an ordinary business letter of two or three hundred words. The wax surface is highly polished; when it has been through the apparatus, the marks or engraving upon it can be seen only with a glass.

When a message is to be recorded, one of these phonograms is slipped over the permanent steel cylinder, which is set in motion, and the diaphragm, carrying its stylus on the under side, is lowered toward the wax surface until a slight grating sound announces that it touches.

Then the talking may begin. It is not necessary to talk louder than in an ordinary conversation, but distinct articulation is required. For reproduction, the stylus is raised, and the “follower” or sounding-spring is brought into contact with the wax. The amount of talking upon a cylinder depends, of course, upon the speed of the talker; one page of this magazine might easily be recorded upon a cylinder ten inches long. The exact value of the reproduction, both in the phonograph and the graphophone, is still, according to my own experience in a score of tests, something of a lottery.

With a phone at my ear, I have heard Mr. Edison’s phonograph read off a page of Nicholas Nickleby so clearly that not one word in twenty was lost; the phonograph’s voice was as distinct and as loud as that of a telephone in good working order. At other times the results have been anything but satisfactory. When the apparatus is in the hands of experts, who can adjust a screw here and there, they are likely to be surprisingly good. As to trusting its manipulation to the office boy or the typewriter girl, that is out of the question for the present. It is far too delicate an instrument. When it comes to music, the present achievements are wonderful. The phonograph will reproduce any kind of music — singing, the piano, violin, cornet, oboe, etc. — with a beauty of tone and accuracy which will astonish the musician. It is possible, also, to magnify musical sounds without distorting them, as often happens where speech is concerned. Thus, I have repeatedly heard music given out by the phonograph so loudly as to be heard one hundred feet away from the instrument. Should the phonograph never reach greater perfection than its present stage, — something which, as I have already said, seems scarcely credible, — it will be of the greatest use to musicians.

If we admit that the inventors or manufacturers of the phonograph can turn out in quantities instruments as perfect as the best of the present experimental machines, and make them so automatic in action and so easily adjusted that every one who uses a sewing-machine, a typewriter, or a telephone can use the phonograph, we concede at once that a wonderful field is before them. The phonograph itself cannot cost more than fifty dollars, and the wax cylinders used upon them scarcely more than writing-paper. Once a cylinder has been “engraved,” or has had a message recorded upon it, it can be passed through the phonograph any number of times, apparently without deterioration. Mr. Edison has some phonograms, containing pages of Nicholas Nickleby, which have been read out thousands of times by the phonograph, and no indications of wear are audible.

Finally, bear in mind that having once obtained a good phonogram, it can be multiplied ad infinitum at nominal cost, and what a wonderful prospect opens before us! The duplication of a phonogram is as simple as it is perfect. The wax phonogram is placed in a bath, and coated with nickel by electric deposition. When the nickel plate is sufficiently thick, it is stripped off, giving an exact mould, a die representing every minute indentation of the original wax. In order to make a second or a thousandth wax facsimile, wax sheets can be pressed against the nickel die. Edison estimates that novels of the length of Nicholas Nickleby could be sold in phonogram shape for a few cents. A good reader would first have to read the whole book to the phonograph, and the multiplication of the resulting phonograms would then be simply a matter of detail.

So also with music, — songs, piano pieces, symphonies, operas. There seems to be no reason why a play cannot be reproduced so as to give infinite pleasure. The length of the phonograph’s message is limited only by the size of the phonograms. Edison estimates that Nicholas Nickleby can be transcribed upon six cylinders, six inches in diameter by twelve inches in length. But some one will soon discover a method of recording the phonographic message upon an endless roll, so that the man who cannot sleep at night will be able to have the machine read to him hour after hour without the trouble of changing cylinders.

As compared with the field of the telephone, that of the phonograph is limitless. The telephone must always remain somewhat of an expensive luxury, owing to the cost of maintaining wires, connecting stations, etc. The whole expense of the phonograph will be the first cost. Even its motive power may be supplied by weights or other costless means. Imagine what the phonograph will do for the man on the borders of civilization! It will supply him with books in a far more welcome shape than print, for they will read themselves; the mail will bring him the latest play of London, or opera of Vienna. If he cares for political speeches, he can have the Congressional Record in the shape of phonograms. It is even possible to imagine that many books and stories may not see the light of print at all; they will go into the hands of their readers, or hearers rather, as phonograms.

As a saving in the time given up to writing, the phonograph promises to far outstrip the typewriter. The business man can dictate to the phonograph as fast as he can talk, and the wax cylinder, enclosed in a suitable box, can be sent off by mail to read out its message perhaps thousands of miles away. Or else, as is now done in Mr. Edison’s laboratory in Orange, N. J., the typewriter girl can print out upon paper what her employer has dictated to the phonograph. For the reporter, the editor, and the author who can dictate, a device has been adapted to the phonograph which causes it to stop its message at every tenth word, and to continue only when a spring is touched. Thus, the editor can dictate his article to the phonograph as he does now to his stenographer, and when the printer at the case gets the resulting phonogram the instrument will dictate to him in short sentences. If he cannot set up the sentence at one hearing, it will repeat its ten words. If he is satisfied, it reads out ten words more.

I really see no reason why the newspaper of the future should not come to the subscriber in the shape of a phonogram. It would have to begin, however, with a table of contents, in order that one might not have to listen to a two hours’ speech upon the tariff question in order to get at ten lines of a musical notice. But think what a musical critic might be able to do for his public! He might give them whole arias from an opera or movements from a symphony, by way of proof or illustration. The very tones of an actor’s or singer’s voice might be reproduced in the morning notice of last night’s important dramatic or musical event.

It has been remarked, by the way, that business letters and orders by phonograph would not be so binding as when put in black and white upon paper. A little wax cylinder covered with microscopic dots would not be considered as good evidence in court. But if the speaker’s voice, inflection, accent, were so reproduced that witnesses could swear to the personality, would it not suffice? How could there be any dispute over a man’s will, when the voice of the dead man was heard?

In music, as I have already said, the value of the phonograph even in its present condition is indisputable. Musicians are divided, and probably always will be, as to the manner in which certain famous symphonies ought to be conducted. The metronome marks used by Beethoven are but uncertain guides at best, while no written directions as to dynamic values, expression, etc., are worth much. The phonograph will at least make it possible for the musician of the future to know exactly how our composers wished their music given, for it will repeat that music as played today, with every shade of expression, with all its infinite changes of time. Moreover, the phonograph will offer to the composer that long-sought instrument, an automatic recorder of improvisation upon the piano or other instrument. In the far-off future, when our descendants wish to compare our simple little Wagner operas with the complex productions of their own days, requiring, perhaps, a dozen orchestras, playing in half a dozen different keys at once, they will have an accurate phonographic record of our harmonic simplicity.

At present but few of the new phonographs have been finished, and those only for exhibition purposes. When they will be offered for sale seems to be doubtful; probably within a few months. Mr. Edison says that by the beginning of 1890 the phonograph will be far less of a curiosity than the telephone is now, and that he could begin selling the instruments at once if he were fully satisfied with them. There is always something which needs improving. Just at present there is needed a funnel for so magnifying the sound that if the instrument is placed in the centre of a table all the persons sitting around can hear its reading or its music. For the last year it has been the same story, — the phonographs would be ready for sale next month. It was so a year ago, and it may be so a year from now. But these many delays, which have made people rather skeptical as to the doings of the phonograph, do not make wonders already achieved less wonderful, or warrant any doubts as to the vast possibilities which the little device contains.

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Karthic Thallikar first noticed the noise sometime in late 2014, back when he still enjoyed taking walks around his neighborhood.

He’d been living with his wife and two kids in the Brittany Heights subdivision in Chandler, Arizona, for two years by then, in a taupe two-story house that Thallikar had fallen in love with on his first visit. The double-height ceilings made it seem airy and expansive; there was a playground around the corner; and the neighbors were friendly, educated people who worked in auto finance or at Intel or at the local high school. Thallikar loved that he could stand in the driveway, look out past a hayfield and the desert scrub of Gila River Indian land, and see the jagged pink outlines of the Estrella Mountains. Until recently, the area around Brittany Heights had been mostly farmland, and there remained a patchwork of alfalfa fields alongside open ranges scruffy with mesquite and coyotes.

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In the evenings, after work, Thallikar liked to decompress by taking long walks around Brittany Heights, following Musket Way to Carriage Lane to Marlin Drive almost as far as the San Palacio and Clemente Ranch housing developments. It was during one of these strolls that Thallikar first became aware of a low, monotone hum, like a blender whirring somewhere in the distance. It was irritating, but he wrote it off. Someone’s pool pump, probably. On another walk a few days later, he heard it again. A carpet-cleaning machine? he wondered. A few nights later, there it was again. It sounded a bit like warped music from some far-off party, but there was no thump or rhythm to the sound. Just one single, persistent note: EHHNNNNNNNN. Evening after evening, he realized, the sound was there—every night, on every street. The whine became a constant, annoying soundtrack to his walks.

And then it spread. In early 2015, Thallikar discovered that the hum had followed him home. This being Arizona, Thallikar and his neighbors rewarded themselves for surviving the punishing summers by spending mild winter evenings outside: grilling, reading, napping around plunge pools, dining under the twinkle of string lights. Thallikar had installed a firepit and Adirondack chairs in his backyard. But whenever he went out to cook or read, there was that damn whine—on the weekends, in the afternoon, late into the night. It was aggravating, and he felt mounting anxiety every day it continued. Where was it coming from? Would it stop? Would it get worse? He started spending more time inside.

Then it was in his bedroom. He had just closed his eyes to go to sleep one night when he heard it: EHHNNNNNNNN. He got up to shut the window, but that made no difference at all. “That was when I started getting concerned,” he observed later. He tried sleeping with earplugs. When that didn’t help, he also tied a towel around his head. When that still wasn’t enough, he moved into the guest room, where the hum seemed slightly fainter. Each night, he’d will himself to sleep, ears plugged and head bandaged, but he could feel the whine in his bones, feel himself getting panicky as it droned on and on and on and on and on. The noise hummed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like a mosquito buzzing in his ear, only louder and more persistent. He sensed it coming from everywhere at once. Thallikar began to dread going home. As the months passed, he felt like he was in a war zone. He wrote in a text message that he felt as though someone was launching “an acoustic attack” on his home.

[From April 2019: James Fallows on leaf blowers and activism]

The earliest noise complaint in history also concerns a bad night’s sleep. The 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh recounts how one of the gods, unable to sleep through humanity’s racket and presumably a little cranky, opts “to exterminate mankind.”

Noise—or what the professionals call a “very dynamic acoustic environment”—can still provoke people to murderous extremes, especially when the emitter disturbs the receiver at home. After repeated attempts to quiet his raucous neighbor, a Fort Worth, Texas, father of two, perturbed by loud music at 2 a.m., called the police, who came, left, and returned less than an hour later, after the man had allegedly shot his neighbor three times—an incident not to be confused with the time a Houston man interrupted his neighbor’s late-night party and, after a showdown over noise, shot and killed the host. In New York City, a former tour-bus driver fed up with noisy parties across the hall allegedly sought help from a hit man. A man in Pennsylvania, said to have had no more trouble with the law than a traffic ticket, ambushed an upstairs couple with whom he’d had noise disputes, shooting them and then himself, and leaving behind a sticky note that read, “Can only be provoked so long before exploding.” There’s the man accused of threatening his noisy neighbors with a gun, the man who shot a middle-school coach after they quarreled over noise, the man who fired on a mother and daughter after griping about sounds from their apartment, the man who killed his roommate after a futile request that he “quiet down,” and the woman who shot at a neighbor after being asked to turn down her music—all since the beginning of this year.

Noise is never just about sound; it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me.

As environmental hazards go, noise gets low billing. There is no Michael Pollan of sound; limiting your noise intake has none of the cachet of going paleo or doing a cleanse. When The New Yorker recently proposed noise pollution as the next public-health crisis, the internet scoffed. “Pollution pollution is the next big (and current) public health crisis,” chided one commenter. Noise is treated less as a health risk than an aesthetic nuisance—a cause for people who, in between rounds of golf and art openings, fuss over the leaf blowers outside their vacation homes. Complaining about noise elicits eye rolls. Nothing will get you labeled a crank faster.

Scientists have known for decades that noise—even at the seemingly innocuous volume of car traffic—is bad for us. “Calling noise a nuisance is like calling smog an inconvenience,” former U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart said in 1978. In the years since, numerous studies have only underscored his assertion that noise “must be considered a hazard to the health of people everywhere.” Say you’re trying to fall asleep. You may think you’ve tuned out the grumble of trucks downshifting outside, but your body has not: Your adrenal glands are pumping stress hormones, your blood pressure and heart rate are rising, your digestion is slowing down. Your brain continues to process sounds while you snooze, and your blood pressure spikes in response to clatter as low as 33 decibels—slightly louder than a purring cat.

Experts say your body does not adapt to noise. Large-scale studies show that if the din keeps up—over days, months, years—noise exposure increases your risk of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and heart attacks, as well as strokes, diabetes, dementia, and depression. Children suffer not only physically—18 months after a new airport opened in Munich, the blood pressure and stress-hormone levels of neighboring children soared—but also behaviorally and cognitively. A landmark study published in 1975 found that the reading scores of sixth graders whose classroom faced a clattering subway track lagged nearly a year behind those of students in quieter classrooms—a difference that disappeared once soundproofing materials were installed. Noise might also make us mean: A 1969 study suggested that test subjects exposed to noise, even the gentle fuzz of white noise, become more aggressive and more eager to zap fellow subjects with electric shocks.

In the extreme, sound becomes a weapon. Since at least the 1960s, scientists have investigated sound’s potential to subdue hostage-takers, protesters, and enemy troops, against whom one expert proposed using low-frequency sound, because it apparently induces “disorientation, vomiting fits, bowel spasms, uncontrollable defecation.” The U.S. military, keenly aware of noise’s power to confuse and annoy, has wielded soundtracks as punishment: It tried to hurry along the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s surrender by blasting his hideout with rock music (Kiss and Rick Astley made the playlist); attacked Fallujah, Iraq, while pounding heavy metal on the battlefield (Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC); tortured Guantánamo detainees with a nonstop barrage of rap and theme songs (Eminem, the Meow Mix jingle); and, under the supervision of the FBI, attempted to aggravate the Branch Davidian cult of Waco, Texas, into surrender with a constant loop of Christmas carols, Nancy Sinatra, Tibetan chants, and dying rabbits. (“If they go Barry Manilow,” said a hostage negotiator at the time, “it’s excessive force.”)

Even when not intentionally deployed for harm, the sound of drilling, barking, building, crying, singing, clomping, dancing, piano practicing, lawn mowing, and generator running becomes, to those exposed, a source of severe anguish that is entirely at odds with our cavalier attitude toward noise. “It feels like it’s eating at your body,” a man plagued by a rattling boiler told a reporter. A woman who was being accosted on all sides by incessant honking told me, “The noise had literally pushed me to a level of feeling suicidal.” For those grappling with it, noise is “chaos,” “torture,” “unbearable,” “nauseating,” “depressing and nerve-racking,” “absolute hell,” and “an ice pick to the brain.” “If you didn’t know they were talking about noise, you might think they were describing some sort of assault,” Erica Walker, an environmental-health researcher at Boston University, has said. This has spurred scientists, physicians, activists, public officials, and, albeit less in the United States, lawmakers to join in the quest for quiet, which is far more elusive than it may seem. “Quiet places,” says the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, “have been on the road to extinction at a rate that far exceeds the extinction of species.”

[From April 2016: The future will be quiet]

Thallikar went hunting for the source of the sound. At first he canvassed the neighborhood by foot, setting out around 10 or 11 o’clock at night, once the thrum of traffic had quieted down. When these “noise patrols,” as he called them, yielded no answers, he expanded his perimeter—by bike, then by car. He’d pull over every few blocks to listen for the whine. The hum was everywhere: outside Building E of the Tri-City Baptist Church and the apartments in San Palacio; near the Extra Space Storage and the no perfect people allowed sign at Hope Covenant Church; ricocheting around the homes in Canopy Lane, Clemente Ranch, Stonefield, the Reserve at Stonefield. He’d go out multiple nights a week, for 10 minutes to an hour, taking notes on where the noise was loudest. The patrols dragged on—one week, two weeks, eight weeks—which led to spats with his wife, who wanted to know why he kept leaving the house so late at night.

Finally, as winter warmed into spring, Thallikar thought he’d identified the source of the whine: a gray, nearly windowless building about half a mile from his house. The two-story structure, which had the charm of a prison and the architectural panache of a shoebox, was clad in concrete and surrounded by chain-link and black-metal fences, plus a cinder-block wall. It belonged to a company called CyrusOne.

There was no thrill in this discovery, just simmering fear that the noise might get worse. Thallikar visited the city-planning clerk, multiple times. She said she couldn’t help and referred him to CyrusOne’s construction manager. Kept awake by the noise at 11 o’clock one Saturday night, Thallikar phoned the man, who protested that he was trying to sleep. “I’m trying to sleep too, dude!” Thallikar told him. When they spoke again the next day, the call ended abruptly, and without resolution.

According to CyrusOne’s website, the company’s Chandler campus offers Fortune 500 companies robust infrastructure for mission-critical applications. In other words, it’s a data center—a columbarium for thousands of servers that store data for access and processing from virtually anywhere in the world. When you check your bank balance or research a used car or book a hotel room, chances are decent that the information comes to you via one of the more than 40 CyrusOne data centers spread around the globe. CyrusOne houses servers belonging to nearly 1,000 companies, including Microsoft, Country Financial, Brink’s, Carfax, and nearly half of the Fortune 20.

Thallikar, wanting to confront the noise personally, made a surprise visit to CyrusOne. He found workers putting up a new building, but learned that the whine was unrelated to construction. It came from the chillers, a bulky assemblage of steel boxes and tubes permanently affixed to the sides of the two existing buildings. Servers, like humans, are happiest at temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the chillers were crucial in keeping the heat-generating machines comfortably cool as they worked. In the fall of 2014, around the time Thallikar started noticing the whine, CyrusOne had had room for 16 chillers. Now it was getting ready to add eight more. During a follow-up visit, Thallikar, who grew up in Bangalore and moved to Arizona in 1990 to study industrial engineering at Arizona State University, said he was informed by a worker at the site that immigrants like him should feel lucky to live in the U.S., noise be damned.

CyrusOne arrived in Chandler shortly before Thallikar did and broke ground two months after he closed on his home. For CyrusOne, Chandler was a “dream come true,” Kevin Timmons, the company’s chief technology officer, told me. The city essentially offered CyrusOne carte blanche to develop an area three times the size of Ellis Island into one of the nation’s largest data-storage complexes: 2 million square feet protected by biometric locks, steel-lined walls, bullet-resistant glass, and dual-action interlocking dry-pipe sprinkler systems. CyrusOne even has two of its own substations humming with enough energy (112 megawatts) to light up every home in Salt Lake City—or, more relevant to the matter at hand, to power several dozen 400- and 500-ton chillers. CyrusOne’s Chandler facility was not only the company’s most ambitious, but the biggest to realize its strategy of wooing clients through ultrafast, just-in-time construction. CyrusOne could now boast of being able to complete a building in 107 days—faster than customers could have their servers ready. “It literally put us on the map,” Timmons said.

Arizona attracts data centers the way Florida attracts plastic surgeons. The state has low humidity; proximity to California—where many users and customers are based—but without its earthquakes or energy prices; and, thanks to lobbying efforts by CyrusOne, generous tax incentives for companies that drop their servers there. Walk 10 minutes due north from CyrusOne’s Chandler complex, and you’ll reach two other data centers, with a third just down the road. Drive 15 minutes from there, and you’ll come across three more. Continue farther east past Wild West Paintball, and you’ll hit an Apple data center, which will soon be joined by a Google facility, plus another data center from CyrusOne. Forty-five minutes west of Thallikar’s home, Compass Datacenters is building on more than 225 acres of land, a plot three times the size of CyrusOne’s in Chandler.

By the summer of 2015, Thallikar had thrown himself into an aggressive campaign to quiet the hum. He went up and down the city’s chain of command, pleading for help. He emailed Chandler’s economic-development innovation manager, its economic-development specialist, and its economic-development director, who replied that Thallikar was the only resident to complain, but dutifully went out, twice, to listen for the high-pitched whine. He didn’t hear it. “I do not think I am imagining things here and wasting people’s time,” Thallikar wrote back, adding that he’d taken his family on his patrol, “and they too could hear the noise.”

Thallikar emailed a news anchor, an executive producer, an editor, and several reporters at the local 12 News TV station, offering to help them “in experiencing the problem so they can relate to it.” He emailed the mayor and all five members of the Chandler city council. Multiple times. Then daily. “The noise gets louder in the night and enters our homes. And the streets are filled with it,” Thallikar wrote in one email. In another: “Just what will it take for one of you to respond to my emails.” He presented his case at a city-council meeting, requesting that a task force be formed to research and stop the whine. He acknowledged that he’d been told the sound seemed suspiciously similar to the buzz of traffic on the 202 freeway nearby.

Thallikar took his campaign to his homeowners’ association and to his neighbors. The response was tepid, though he did persuade one person to email the city. Thallikar reached out, again, to CyrusOne, and to the Chandler Police Department. Commander Gregg Jacquin promised to investigate, but suggested that Thallikar might have more success if he cooled it with all the emails to city officials, which were creeping into the high double digits. Thallikar started keeping a log of how the noise changed, hour to hour and day to day. It was getting louder, he was sure.

In the fall of 2015, Jacquin emailed Thallikar to say that he’d gone in search of the noise, but hadn’t heard it. “I am not making this up—even though I do not have the measurement numbers,” Thallikar wrote back. “The noise heard over the weekend starting on Saturday starting around 10 pm through Sunday was very very bad. I got a nervous headache, and had to take medications.” He never heard back from Jacquin. Before long, Thallikar began to contemplate selling his home.

Noise is a clever enemy. It leaves no trace and vanishes when chased. It’s hard to measure or describe. It is also relative. “Sound is when you mow your lawn, noise is when your neighbor mows their lawn, and music is when your neighbor mows your lawn,” says Arjun Shankar, an acoustic consultant. Noise is also fiendishly difficult to legislate, though for nearly as long as humans have lived together, we have seen fit to try. The ancient Greeks of Sybaris are credited with introducing the first noise ordinance, in the eighth century b.c., banishing roosters as well as blacksmiths, carpenters, and other “noisy arts” from the city limits. In the United States, the appetite for noise control reached its apex in 1972, when President Richard Nixon enacted the country’s first federal statute specifically targeting noise pollution, which empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to quiet the country. Nine years later, the Reagan administration withdrew funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control, foisting responsibility back onto state and local governments. Since then, little has changed. “Unfortunately,” says New York City’s longtime noise czar, Arline Bronzaft, “the federal government is essentially out of the noise business.”

In the ensuing decades, the war on noise has shifted to the margins—a loose flock of mom-and-pop organizers whose agitations have all the glitz and edge of a church bake sale. The mood on pro-quiet listservs skews defeatist, the general tone more support group than picket line. (The landing page for the Right to Quiet Society politely instructs newcomers, “If you did not like what you saw here, without telling us, you might consider leaving quietly.”) Anti-noise crusaders band together in ragtag crews united by geography or irritant. Depending on whether your trigger point concerns planes, trains, blowers, Jet Skis, dirt bikes, concerts, boom cars, cars, motorcycles, or Muzak, you might join ROAR (Residents Opposed to Airport Racket), HORN (Halt Outrageous Railroad Noise), BLAST (Ban Leaf Blowers and Save Our Town), CALM (Clean Alternative Landscaping Methods), HEAVEN (Healthier Environment Through Abatement of Vehicle Emission and Noise), CRASH (County Residents Against Speedway Havoc), Pipedown (“the campaign for freedom from piped music”), or roughly 150 other organizations with varying levels of activity. In the United States, one of the few emitter-agnostic groups with a national scope is Noise Free America, which has 51 local chapters, noise counselors on call, and, for four out of the past six years, a tradition of going to Washington, D.C., to petition lawmakers—the pinnacle of which was once getting to meet then–Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff.

On a recent Sunday morning, I joined Noise Free America’s founder and director, Ted Rueter, for what he billed as a “noise tour” of Brooklyn—a pilgrimage to some of the borough’s most sonorously grating street corners. Rueter, a 62-year-old political-science professor, met me at a Starbucks on Flatbush Avenue wearing khaki shorts, a pink polo shirt, and Bose noise-canceling headphones. He was joined by three New Yorkers concerned with the din of their neighborhoods: Manohar Kanuri, a former stock analyst who lives above the incessant beeping of construction and delivery trucks in Manhattan’s Battery Park City; Ashley, a 40-something who’s moved three times in an effort to escape thunderous parties; and Vivianne, a woman who lives with the constant staccato of honking livery cabs, dollar vans, and impatient drivers. (Ashley and Vivianne asked not to be identified by their real names.) For Rueter, who was in town from Durham, North Carolina, a tour of New York’s cacophony seemed to have the exotic thrill of going on safari. Kanuri, Ashley, and Vivianne had corresponded extensively online, but this was their first time meeting in person, and they appeared delighted at getting to bond with sympathetic ears. “We build coalition this way,” Kanuri said.

All three New Yorkers had tried tackling their noise issues through traditional avenues—the 311 nonemergency line (which receives more reports about noise than about any other issue), the local police, their city-council members, the public advocate, the mayor—but found the city unsympathetic, unresponsive, or ineffective. Before heading out on the noise tour, they sat in the Starbucks venting about the difficulties of catching emitters in the act and encouraging police to take action. Ashley had placed so many 311 calls that she worried about getting arrested, like a Bronx woman who was thrown in a holding cell on charges of entering false information in the public record after calling 44 times in 15 months—often to report her neighbors’ racket. Vivianne warned Ashley that the police had probably pegged her as a “serial complainer”—among anti-noise crusaders, a dreaded fate.

Noise codes tend to be either qualitative (prohibiting subjectively defined “disturbing” or “unreasonably loud” noise) or quantitative (defining, in measurable terms, what constitutes disturbing or unreasonably loud noise). New York City’s noise code, which is the latter, considers barking a nuisance only if a dog yaps for 10 minutes straight between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., or for five minutes straight between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. (Four and a half minutes of barking at 2 a.m. is, technically, permissible.) At night, restaurants can be fined if their music measures in excess of 42 decibels from inside a nearby apartment and seven decibels above the level of ambient street sounds. 


Most ordinances correlate punishable noise with loudness, though if you’ve ever tried to sleep through a dripping faucet, you know that something can be quiet and still drive you up the wall. Research confirms that what makes a sound annoying is only partially whether it whispers or roars. The volume at which noise begins to irritate varies depending on the source—we tolerate trains at louder volumes than cars, and cars at louder volumes than planes—and its pitch, or frequency. (Humans can hear sounds between 20 and 20,000 hertz, which roughly ranges from the low-frequency thump of subwoofers to the high-frequency buzz of certain crickets.) We are more sensitive to mid-frequency sounds—voices, birdsong, squealing brakes, shrieking infants—and perceive these sounds as louder than they are. Contrary to the stereotype of the old man shaking his fist, age and gender are not necessarily strong predictors of annoyance.

Nor must noises be heard in order to harm. Earplugs may dull the whine of motorcycles chugging outside your bedroom, but they’re useless against the engines’ low-frequency rumble, which vibrates the windows, floors, and your chest, and is the type of sound that’s largely ignored in most official noise calculations. (Harley-Davidson, which considers that thudding a point of pride, tried to trademark the sound of its V-twin motorcycle engine, which its lawyer translated as “potato potato potato” said very fast.) When regulatory officials evaluate environmental noise—to determine, say, whether to soundproof schools near airport runways—their calculations emphasize the mid-frequency sounds to which our ears are most sensitive and discount the low-frequency sounds (think wind turbines, washing machines, kids galloping upstairs) that have been shown to travel farther and trigger stronger stress responses. “If you actually measured sound using the right metric, you’ll see that you’re harming a lot more people than you think you are,” says Walker, the environmental-health researcher, who is working with communities near flight paths and freeways to rethink how noise is quantified.

Years ago, the staff of a medical-equipment company became spooked by recurring sightings of a gray, spectral figure haunting their lab. One night, an engineer working late alone felt a chill pass through the room and, out of the corner of his eye, saw a soundless figure hovering beside him. When he wheeled around, no one was there. The next day, while adjusting one of the machines in the lab, he began to feel the same creeping unease. The poltergeist? A vibrating extractor fan, he realized. He published a paper on his ghost-busting, which concluded that the machine was emitting low-frequency sound waves: pulses of energy too low in frequency to be heard by humans, yet powerful enough to affect our bodies—comparable, he found, to the inaudible vibrations in a supposedly haunted cellar and in the long, windy hallways that appear in scary stories. In addition to causing shivering, sweating, difficulty breathing, and blurry vision as a result of vibrating eyeballs, low-frequency sounds can also, apparently, produce ghosts.

[Read: City noise might be making you sick]

For two years, Thallikar complained to anyone who would listen and even to those who would not. Meanwhile, CyrusOne kept building. The company finished three new buildings and bought 29 more acres of land in Chandler, growing the site to more than 85 acres. In a press release, it congratulated itself for “ensuring CyrusOne maintains the largest data center campus in the Southwest and one of the largest in the United States,” and cheered plans to build a comparable facility in California.

Some nights, Thallikar couldn’t sleep at all. He started wearing earplugs during the day, and stopped spending time outdoors. He looked for excuses to leave town and, in the evenings, returned to his old neighborhood in Tempe to take his constitutionals there. As he drove home, he’d have a pit in his stomach. He couldn’t stop himself from making the noise a recurring conversation topic at dinner.

Not only was the whine itself agitating—EHHNNNNNNNN—but its constant drone was like a cruel mnemonic for everything that bothered him: his powerlessness, his sense of injustice that the city was ignoring its residents’ welfare, his fear of selling his home for a major loss because no one would want to live with the noise, his regret that his family’s haven (not to mention their biggest investment) had turned into a nightmare. EHHNNN. EHHNNNNNNNNN. EHHNNNNNNNNNNNN. He tried meditating. He considered installing new windows to dull the hum, or planting trees to block the noise. He researched lawyers. And he made one final appeal to the newly elected members of the Chandler city council.

Lo and behold, one wrote back, promising to look into the issue.

The council member followed up a few weeks later. “According to the chief, police had visited 16 times on the site and conducted investigations on your claim,” he wrote. “They found the noise level was not significant enough to cause an issue.” Thallikar contacted a real-estate agent. He would lose money, and he’d have to move to a smaller house, but by the end of 2017, he’d decided to sell his home.

To spend time with noise warriors is to become frustratingly attuned to every gurgle, squeal, clank, and creak. As I set out with Rueter and the three New Yorkers on the noise tour, the anonymous din of Flatbush Avenue splintered into a riotous skronk of bleating cars, rattling generators, and snarling planes. Sirens yowled and vents whistled; a motorcycle potato-potato-potatoed and a can skittered on the concrete.

R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer who, in the 1960s, pioneered the field of acoustic ecology, has advocated “soundwalks” as an activity that, even more effectively than ordinances, could curb noise pollution by making people more aware of their habitat’s acoustics. A soundwalk—during which you actively listen to the sonic demeanor of your surroundings—might involve tallying the number of car horns you hear in the course of an hour or scavenger-hunting for sounds with specific characteristics, like a buzz followed by a squeak. Schafer saw soundwalks as a way to address our sonological incompetence. Teach people to tune in to their soundscapes, and they will understand which sounds to preserve and which to eliminate, then act accordingly.

The first stop on our noise tour was, mercifully, a place of quiet. We gathered in silence around a small koi pond on the Brooklyn College campus. I forced myself to listen carefully. An air conditioner purred. Water burbled. A child hollered. “See, once a kid comes, that’s when the screaming starts,” Ashley said.

She and Kanuri discussed the inefficacy of earplugs and the pros and cons of analog versus digital white-noise machines. Ashley said she slept with three white-noise machines (which hardly makes her an exception among the sound-sufferers I met) and, because of a whistler in her office, had started wearing earplugs at work.

“Are you familiar with something called slow TV?” Kanuri asked Ashley. “It’s a sailboat that runs 10 hours, and all you hear is the ship breaking water. That’s it. Every now and then you’ll hear bruhhhhh—another ship that passes by. That’s it. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.”

Stéphane Pigeon, an audio-processing engineer based in Brussels, has become the Taylor Swift of white noise, traveling the world recording relaxing soundscapes for his website, myNoise.net, which offers its more than 15,000 daily listeners an encyclopedic compendium of noise-masking tracks that range from “Distant Thunder” to “Laundromat,” a listener request. (White noise, technically speaking, contains all audible frequencies in equal proportion. In the natural world, falling rain comes close to approximating this pan-frequency shhhhhh.) Impulse noises, such as honking, barking, hammering, and snoring, are the hardest to mask, but Pigeon has tried: While traveling in the Sahara, he recorded “Berber Tent,” a myNoise hit designed to help snorees by harmonizing the gentle whoosh of wind, the burble of boiling water, and the low rattle of snoring. Because covering up a snorer’s brief, punchy HRROHN! is exceedingly difficult, “the goal is to try to persuade you that snoring could be a beautiful sound,” Pigeon told me.

After a few minutes at the pond, we reluctantly tore ourselves from the quiet to prowl Brooklyn’s streets for sounds. Farther north on Flatbush Avenue, encircled by lowing horns and a wheezing Mister Softee truck, Kanuri used his sound-meter app to measure the ambient noise—a disappointing 75.9 decibels, lower than everyone had thought but still more than 20 decibels above the threshold at which, per a 1974 EPA report, we get distracted or annoyed by sound. (Decibels, which measure volume, are logarithmic: Turn up a sound by 10 decibels, and most people will perceive its loudness as having doubled.) The soundscape shushed as we approached the stately brownstones near Prospect Park, then thumped to life again when we stopped for lunch at, of all places, Screamer’s Pizzeria. “Would it be possible during our short stay here to turn down the music?” Rueter asked a server.

Desperate ears call for desperate measures, and the noise-afflicted go to elaborate lengths to lower the volume. Kanuri taught himself to code so he could analyze New York City’s 311 data and correlate noise complaints with elective districts; he hoped he could hold politicians accountable. Having tried moving bedrooms and also apartments, Ashley is now moving across the country, to a suburb in the Southwest. I spoke with a New Yorker who, unable to afford a move, has been sleeping in her closet—armed with earplugs, headphones, an AC unit, a fan, and two white-noise machines. A Wisconsin man who’d re-insulated, re-drywalled, and re-windowed his home was ultimately offered sleeping medication and antidepressants. An apartment dweller in Beijing, fed up with the calisthenics of the kids upstairs, got revenge by attaching a vibrating motor to his ceiling that rattled the family’s floor. The gadget is available for purchase online, where you can also find Coat of Silence paint, AlphaSorb Bass Traps, the Noise Eater Isolation Foot, the Sound Soother Headband, and the Sonic Nausea Electronic Disruption Device, which promises, irresistibly, “inventive payback.”

One might also run for president. Arline Bronzaft, the New York City noise czar, speculates that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was motivated by his quest to quiet the aircraft that disrupted Mar-a-Lago’s “once serene and tranquil ambience”—so described in one of the lawsuits Trump filed in his 20-year legal battle against Palm Beach County. Six days after he was elected—and the Federal Aviation Administration shared plans to limit flights over his resort—a Trump spokesperson announced that he would abandon the lawsuit.

Scientists have yet to agree on a definition for noise sensitivity, much less determine why some individuals seem more prone to it, though there have been cases linking sensitivity to hearing loss. What is clear, however, is that sound, once noticed, becomes impossible to ignore. “Once you are bothered by a sound, you unconsciously train your brain to hear that sound,” Pigeon said. “That phenomenon just feeds itself into a diabolic loop.” Research suggests habituation, the idea that we’ll just “get used to it,” is a myth. And there is no known cure. Even for sufferers of tinnitus—an auditory affliction researchers understand far better than noise sensitivity—the most effective treatment that specialists can offer is a regimen of “standard audiological niceness”: listening to them complain and reassuring them the noise won’t kill them. Or, as one expert put it, “lending a nice ear.”

[From October 2019: Rebecca Giggs on why whale songs are getting deeper]

During the summer of 2017, Cheryl Jannuzzi, who lived a short drive from Thallikar, in Clemente Ranch, began to hear humming coming from somewhere behind her house. For a while, she’d had to endure the clang and beep of construction, but this was different—like an endlessly revving engine, or a jet warming up for takeoff.

Jannuzzi contacted the city, and was told that the complex directly across Dobson Road from her backyard was a data center. This was news to her, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. “They’re just housing data,” she thought. “That shouldn’t be making so much noise.”

Around Halloween, Jennifer Goehring started to notice a buzzing sound. It gave her headaches and kept her up at night, but her husband couldn’t hear it, and neither could her kids. She worried that she might be losing her mind. She began sleeping with sound machines and pillows over her head, and went to the doctor to be sure she didn’t have an ear infection. She didn’t.

Amy Weber was with her Bible-study group in her backyard when she became aware of a consistent tone that hummed above everyone’s voices. She and her husband, Steve, had heard the construction on Dobson Road for ages, but this whirring sound didn’t seem to stop, or change. They tried to identify it by process of elimination, even climbing out of bed one night to clear crud from their pool pump, which, they discovered, wasn’t turned on.

Eventually, through their own patrols, they identified the source. The week after Christmas, the Webers papered Clemente Ranch with flyers and created a website asking people if they’d been bothered by a “constant humming/whirring sound” coming from CyrusOne. Complaints from more than 120 people flowed in.

Thallikar heard about the Webers’ efforts from one of his neighbors, and on January 23, 2018, he went to their home for the standing-room-only inaugural meeting of the Dobson Noise Coalition. People complained about headaches, irritability, difficulty sleeping. Jannuzzi had tried to muffle the sound by installing thick wooden barn doors over her sliding glass doors, and another neighbor had mounted sound-absorbing acoustic board in her bedroom windows. For five years, you couldn’t have bought a house on Jannuzzi’s block, but now several of her neighbors were planning to move.

When it was Thallikar’s turn, the story of his three-year odyssey poured out: the sleepless nights, the feelings of being under attack, the unresponsive officials and unanswered emails. Jaws dropped. He wanted to know why no one else had spoken up earlier. “I think we all went through a period of ‘Maybe it’ll go away,’ ” said one neighbor. Others had assumed something was wrong with them, or else had struggled to trace the sound to its source.

The Dobson Noise Coalition jumped into action. Its members circulated a petition asking CyrusOne to stop its racket, which 317 people signed. They wrote to CyrusOne, twice, but heard nothing. They contacted Chandler officials—who were considerably more receptive to the group than they had been to Thallikar alone—and got the city manager to send CyrusOne’s CEO a certified letter requesting a “plan of action.” For weeks, CyrusOne responded with silence.

The nature of noise is shifting. Sonic gripes from the 18th and 19th centuries—church bells, carriage wheels, the hollering of street criers—sound downright charming to today’s ears. Since then, our soundscape has been overpowered by the steady roar of machines: a chorus of cars, planes, trains, pumps, drills, stereos, and turbines; of jackhammers, power saws, chain saws, cellphones, and car alarms, plus generators, ventilators, compressors, street sweepers, helicopters, mowers, and data centers, which are spreading in lockstep with our online obsession and racking up noise complaints along the way. Communities in France, Ireland, Norway, Canada, North Carolina, Montana, Virginia, Colorado, Delaware, and Illinois have all protested the whine of data centers. That’s to say nothing of what drones may bring. “The next century will do to the air what the 20th century did to the land, which is to put roads and noise everywhere,” Les Blomberg, the executive director of the nonprofit Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, told me. Noise, having emancipated itself from the human hand, is becoming autonomous and inexhaustible. Human noisemakers have to sleep, but our mechanical counterparts, which do not tire, die, or strain their vocal cords, can keep up a constant, inescapable clamor.

Study after study has reached the hardly earth-shattering conclusion that we largely prefer the sounds of nature to those of machines. A 2008 research project that played subjects 75 recordings, ranging from a cat’s meow to skidding tires, found the five most agreeable sounds to be running water, bubbling water, flowing water, a small waterfall, and a baby laughing. Other studies—echoing spa brochures—tell us that natural sounds promote relaxation.

And yet we’re muffling them with our racket, to the detriment of other species. The concentration of stress hormones in elk and wolf feces spikes when snowmobiles arrive, then returns to normal when the machines disappear; a similar pattern was observed for North Atlantic right whales subjected to the whine of ship traffic. (One bioacoustics researcher told The New York Times that the acoustic emissions of air guns, used to map the ocean floor, are creating a “living hell” for undersea creatures.) Birds in noisy habitats become screechier to make themselves heard above our din—sparrows that “used to sound like, say, George Clooney would now sound like Bart Simpson,” one ornithologist told a reporter—and this phenomenon has been linked to decreases in species diversity, bird populations, and tree growth.

Though data are scarce, the world appears to be growing louder. The National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division, which sends researchers to measure the acoustics of the American outdoors, estimates that noise pollution doubles or triples every 30 years. The EPA last measured our nation’s volume in 1981; assuming (generously) that our collective cacophony has remained constant, calculations from 2013 estimate that more than 145 million Americans are exposed to noise exceeding the recommended limits. In the absence of more recent surveys, the volume at which emergency vehicles shriek is telling, given that sirens must be loud enough to pierce the ambient noise level. According to measurements by R. Murray Schafer, a fire-engine siren from 1912 reached 88 to 96 decibels measured from 11 feet away, whereas by 1974, sirens’ screeches hit 114 decibels at the same distance—an increase in volume, he noted, of about half a decibel a year. The latest fire-engine sirens howl louder still: 123 decibels at 10 feet.

Not everyone bears the brunt of the din equally. Belying its dismissal as a country-club complaint, noise pollution in the U.S. tends to be most severe in poor communities, as well as in neighborhoods with more people of color. A 2017 paper found that urban noise levels were higher in areas with greater proportions of black, Asian, and Hispanic residents than in predominantly white neighborhoods. Urban areas where a majority of residents live below the poverty line were also subjected to significantly higher levels of nighttime noise, and the study’s authors warned that their findings likely underestimated the differences, given that many wealthy homeowners invest in soundproofing.

“If you want to access quietness, more and more you have to pay,” says Antonella Radicchi, an architect who helps map quiet spaces in cities. Radicchi believes access to quiet havens should be a right for every city dweller, not only the rich, who can afford to escape noise—via spas, silent yoga retreats, lush corporate campuses. For $6,450, not including airfare, you too can take a plane to a car to a motorboat to a canoe to a hiking trail to spend three days with a tour group along Ecuador’s Zabalo River, which was recently named the world’s first Wilderness Quiet Park. The designation was developed by the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who has crisscrossed the globe recording natural soundscapes and, through his nonprofit, Quiet Parks International, is on a mission to “save quiet.” The organization is developing standards to measure the quietness of parks, trails, hotels, and residential communities, and will offer accreditation to areas that are suitably silent. (The Zabalo River qualified for Wilderness Quiet Park status by having a noise-free interval of at least 15 minutes, during which no man-made sounds were audible.)

[Read: How noise pollution impairs learning]

I spoke with Hempton via Skype several days after he’d returned from the Zabalo River. He was tan, with close-cropped gray hair and a tattoo on each forearm—one, of a leaf, inspired by his most recent visit to the Zabalo and another, he said, by an epiphany during his first solo campout in the Amazon jungle. Like other quiet advocates, Hempton speaks with the calm confidence, parallel sentence structure, and hypnotic cadence of a guru. I asked him what he sees as the value of quiet. “The further we get into quiet, the further we discover who we are,” Hempton said. “When you speak from a quiet place, when you are quiet, you think differently. You are more uniquely yourself. You are not echoing advertisements. You are not echoing billboards. You are not echoing modern songs. You’re echoing where you were.” When I asked Hempton’s co-founder the same thing, he chided me: “That question itself comes from a noisy situation.”

Before starting Quiet Parks International, Hempton launched an effort to preserve the sonic pristineness of the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington’s Olympic National Park. In 2005, Hempton could sit in the park for an hour without hearing man-made sounds—there was only the low, breathy whistle of the wind, the tap of rain on Sitka spruce, black-tailed deer crunching over felled hemlock, and marbled murrelets trilling. Today, thanks to an increase in flights from a naval air base, Hempton says the noise-free interval has dropped to 10 minutes.

This summer, I traveled to Chandler to hear the whine for myself. A few months after the creation of the Dobson Noise Coalition, CyrusOne emailed the group promising to be a “good neighbor” and said it would install “sound attenuation packages” on its chillers by October 2018. But that October came and went, and, the neighbors agreed, the noise was worse than ever.

So they kicked their efforts into high gear. In the 17 months since the Dobson Noise Coalition was founded, its members have consulted lawyers, filed police reports, gotten coverage in the local news, and met with Chandler’s chief of police. Armed with videos, written testimony, and detailed timelines, more than two dozen unsmiling neighbors dressed in red presented their grievances to the Chandler city council. That finally got them a meeting with CyrusOne.

In May, delegates from the Dobson Noise Coalition parleyed with delegates from CyrusOne, including an acoustic consultant the company had hired. According to his measurements, the whine of the chillers falls between 630 and 1,000 hertz—directly in the mid-frequency spectrum, the range our ears are most sensitive to—and is a pure-tone sound, widely considered exceptionally irritating. CyrusOne reiterated that it would spend $2 million wrapping each and every chiller in custom-made, mass-loaded vinyl blankets designed to lower the whine by 10 decibels. Any future chillers would also be swaddled.

Kevin Timmons, CyrusOne’s chief technology officer, took me on a golf-cart tour of the exterior of the mission-critical facility, of which no inside tours are permitted without a signed nondisclosure agreement. Even Timmons kept getting locked out of different quadrants and having to summon security guards for help. He first heard about the noise complaints in early 2018, and said the neighbors’ annoyance came as a surprise. “We were a little bit stunned for a number of months while we tried to figure out if this was real,” he told me. “And it was made clear to us that, whether real or imagined, it is something that we have to do something about.” He regretted not acting faster and worried that even after the seven-figure soundproofing, some people could never unhear the whine: “Once you hear an annoying sound, humans could actually start listening for that sound.” Recently, he told me, residents living near a CyrusOne data center in Dallas have started complaining about a hum.

The week I visited, CyrusOne had finished wrapping 24 of the now 56 chillers at the Chandler complex. The neighbors were split on whether the blankets helped, but they were unanimously livid that the city had allowed a data center in their backyard in the first place. They had a lot of questions about due diligence: What studies had been done? What measurements taken? None, I learned: Chandler’s city planners are not required to consider noise when issuing permits, nor did they. Plus, most of CyrusOne’s land was zoned for industrial use in 1983, 13 years before the closest homes, in Clemente Ranch, were built. The neighbors all knew the local noise code, chapter and verse—“No person shall disturb the peace, quiet and comfort of any neighborhood by creating therein any disturbing or unreasonably loud noise”—and demanded to know why CyrusOne hadn’t at the very least been cited, given that it was unquestionably disturbing their peace, quiet, and comfort.

I posed that question to Commander Edward Upshaw, a 33-year veteran of the Chandler Police Department, as we cruised the outskirts of the CyrusOne campus, a steady hum faintly audible over the rumble of late-afternoon traffic. “Issuing a citation and charging somebody with a crime for this level of noise? Not going to happen,” Upshaw said. We pulled over in Chuparosa Park and stood a few yards from the cinder-block wall that marked the outer edge of CyrusOne. “People sell radios that make white noise or waves that’s louder than this,” he said. “There’s people that pay for this! I don’t know what the issue is.” We drove inside Clemente Ranch. “If you called a New York police officer for this noise, tell me what would happen. Tell me! Tell me what would happen.”

The following evening, I drove to Thallikar’s home, one in a row of tidy stucco houses bordered by saguaros and Jeep Wranglers. We sat in his living room next to a glass coffee table covered with folders and papers documenting his noise fight.

After teaming up with the Dobson Noise Coalition, Thallikar decided to hold off on selling his home. He was “cautiously optimistic,” but still wanted to know why the city allowed the “monstrosity,” with its “goddamned machines,” to escape punishment for disturbing the peace. He rejected the idea that anyone could judge the hum based on a short visit. “They are going there and sampling the problem,” Thallikar said. “I’m experiencing it day and night.” But he conceded that CyrusOne’s noise level was about 20 percent better than it had been, and he’d recently moved back into his master bedroom.

As CyrusOne had gotten quieter, though, Thallikar had noticed another, different whine. Through a new round of patrols, he’d traced it to GM Financial, which was equipped with its own platoon of chillers. He presented his findings to the city manager in a PowerPoint presentation, which identified as sources of “injurious noise pollution” chillers and generators at GM Financial; the Digital Realty data center around the corner from his home; and, potentially, the forthcoming Northrop Grumman complex. (Digital Realty and GM Financial said they were aware of the complaints but, after investigating, deemed no action necessary; the owner of Northrop Grumman’s building told me any noise concerns were “unfounded.”)

Thallikar offered to take me on a listening tour of the injurious noise pollution, and we hopped into a road-worn Toyota Camry, which Thallikar steered to the GM Financial parking lot. We sidled up to a locked metal gate. “You hear this?” Thallikar said. EHHNNNNNNNN, said something from within the enclosure. “I don’t know how many units they have inside. You hear this, right? In the evenings it becomes louder and louder.”

After a few other stops, we doubled back to concentrate on the area around CyrusOne. For more than an hour, we circled its campus, pulling over every so often. As the sun and traffic dropped, the intensity of the hum rose. The droning wasn’t loud, but it was noticeable. It became irritatingly noticeable as the sky dimmed to black, escalating from a wheezy buzz to a clear, crisp, unending whine.

“This is depressing,” Thallikar said as we stood on a sidewalk in Clemente Ranch. “Like somebody in pain, crying. Crying constantly and moaning in pain.”

We were silent again and listened to the data center moaning. Which was also, in a sense, the sound of us living: the sound of furniture being purchased, of insurance policies compared, of shipments dispatched and deliveries confirmed, of security systems activated, of cable bills paid. In Forest City, North Carolina, where some Facebook servers have moved in, the whine is the sound of people liking, commenting, streaming a video of five creative ways to make eggs, uploading bachelorette-party photos. It’s perhaps the sound of Thallikar’s neighbor posting “Has anyone else noticed how loud it’s been this week?” to the Dobson Noise Coalition’s Facebook group. It’s the sound of us searching for pink-eye cures, or streaming porn, or checking the lyrics to “Old Town Road.” The sound is the exhaust of our activity. Modern life—EHHNNNNNNNN—humming along.

The hum had settled into a strong, unwavering refrain by the time Thallikar dropped me off at my hotel, which looked out over the CyrusOne campus. I could see a new building under construction, plus a lot for another building of equal size. Beyond that, just down the street from where Thallikar lived, was a bald patch of land with space for two more buildings. CyrusOne had room to add 96 more chillers, almost double the number whining now.

This article appears in the November 2019 print edition with the headline “The End of Silence.”

Buying a new smartphone comes with lots of decisions. iPhone Pro or iPhone Air? “Cosmic Orange” or “Deep Blue”? Now there’s a new consideration to add to the list: buy or rent? Yesterday, Apple announced a new monthly lease program, which will allow prospective buyers to rent new electronics such as iPhones, MacBooks, iPads, and Apple Watches via an agreement with Klarna, the same company that facilitates monthly payments for $4 polyester underthings on Shein.

Perhaps you already make monthly payments for your iPhone. Since 2015, Apple has offered an “iPhone Upgrade Program” that similarly offers customers the option to pay off the device over time instead of in one lump sum. But under that arrangement, the monthly payments were not a lease but rather installments of a loan. Failing to pay your bill might have hurt your credit and eventually led to aggravated calls from a collections agency, but your phone was your phone, with all the candy you could crush.

Not anymore. The Klarna plan—“Apple Upgrade,” which replaces the iPhone Upgrade Program—is truly, legally, a lease. This is confusing! And it’s confusing in part because this is not how Klarna, a well-known buy-now, pay-later service, typically operates: When you use Klarna for clothing from Shein or lip kits at Sephora or an Xbox at GameStop, you’re paying back a loan, exactly as you were in the original iPhone Upgrade Program. Same if you use Klarna to buy a Samsung Galaxy phone. But with Apple Upgrade, you are renting: The Mac or Apple Watch is not yours until the final payment is made.

[Read: I am in cloud-storage hell]

There’s nothing wrong with flexibility, and leasing models exist for many expensive items—cars, grand pianos, apartments. Not everyone wants or needs to own property. Many people would rather have a high-end device at an affordable monthly cost rather than pay for one outright; all the better that they can upgrade to a new model before they’ve even finished paying off the entire cost.

But Apple products are particularly personal things. They’re communication devices that hold your intimate photos and videos, health data, and so forth. A rental model puts consumers in the strange position of storing all of this information in a gadget that Apple and Klarna maintain a lot of control over. Missing three consecutive payments with Klarna will obligate you to return the device or pay off the entire balance immediately. It is also theoretically possible that Apple or Klarna could eventually restrict access to various features if lease payments are missed; 9to5Mac has reported that code for such restrictions is present in a beta version of the upcoming iOS 27. When I reached Apple for comment, the spokesperson Brian Bumbery said that “there will be no restrictions or changes to functionality due to missed payments,” though why iOS 27 includes these options remains unclear. (Klarna did not respond to a request for comment.)

The shift to renting versus owning is also symbolic of darker currents in the tech industry. Thanks to a shortage of memory chips produced by the profoundly resource-hungry and inefficient AI industry, consumer electronics are becoming much more expensive across the board. Last month, Apple raised prices on many of its devices, citing the increasing cost of memory. The new upgrade program will make Apple’s electronics look more affordable than they really are.

[Read: The $10,000 MacBook Pro is here]

Consider a student or a young professional, or perhaps an underemployed older one, who needs a new laptop. They decide on a MacBook. Apple Upgrade will appear to be the best deal: In its announcement, Apple offers the example of a 14-inch MacBook Pro that retails for $1,999 but that can be had for a monthly lease. Perhaps this person goes for the two-year term, which has them paying $54 a month. Best Buy, which currently has the same computer on sale for $1,849, offers an 18-month loan repayment with $103 installments. Apple’s deal appears to be cheaper: The 24-month lease adds up to $1,296; Best Buy’s 18-month loan lands at the store’s full retail price of $1,849.

Why does Best Buy’s laptop seem more expensive? It’s because the plan is actually designed for you to fully pay off the device. At the end of the 24-month MacBook Pro lease, meanwhile, the consumer will still owe $703, meaning that the actual total price of the Apple arrangement is $1,999—higher than Best Buy’s offer. A person can choose to pay off the full amount, return the device outright, or swap for a new one. This is a lot of money, and so the likelihood is that this customer will just go ahead and do the trade-in, restarting a cycle in which they are bleeding their bank accounts to pay for a device they do not own and possibly will never own. And on it goes, in perpetuity.

[Read: Watch Apple trash-compact human culture]

Apple, which reached a market value of more than $5 trillion, its highest ever, the same day it announced Apple Upgrade, has produced a scheme that will eke out more money from its customers than it did before. (Notably, the new plan does not include AppleCare+, as the previous iPhone Upgrade Program did, so consumers will have to add the cost of the warranty or risk having to continue paying the rental fee on a device that they lose or break.) All of this can feel cynical, but of course many technology companies are attempting some version of the same premise: At this point, I pay monthly or annual subscription fees to Apple, Google, Anthropic, Amazon, Sony, and Nintendo for services layered on top of products that once took far less from me. Doing so grants me access to cloud storage and advanced features that would now be difficult to separate myself from. I walked into the trap myself—even saw it coming—but I am nonetheless ensnared.

Photographs by Nic Antaya

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You won’t find a much harsher critic of the Democratic Party than the progressive trying to secure its nomination for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. When I caught up with him last week in Ann Arbor, he was at a café holding an outdoor roundtable with young voters, many of them college students or recent graduates. The normally voluble El-Sayed, drinking matcha and dressed casually in his signature tight black T-shirt and jeans, listened as much as he talked, and he heard the students describe their disillusionment with politics—and especially with Democratic candidates.

“Your generation has a great bullshit meter, because you’re fed bullshit online all day,” El-Sayed told the group. “And the Democratic Party brand right now is so bullshit.” It was not a statement with which any of the students seemed to disagree. “You tell it like it is, and that’s what we young people want,” Joe Garris, the president of the College Democrats at Eastern Michigan University, told El-Sayed. “We don’t want to hear corporate answers anymore. We just want the straight truth.”

One of the few factors that could impede a Democratic wave in this year’s midterms is the party’s own unpopularity; polling suggests that plenty of voters outside college campuses might also nod along to El-Sayed’s denunciation of Democrats. Antipathy toward the party is fueling the rise of populist insurgents such as El-Sayed, who castigate Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer with nearly as much fervor as they criticize President Trump.

Nowhere are the lines dividing Democrats more clearly drawn than in Michigan, a state that the party must win to have any real chance of retaking the Senate majority in November. Democrats have to flip four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own, and Michigan is the Democratic-held seat at the most risk of going red. (The incumbent, Senator Gary Peters, is retiring.) El-Sayed is battling Representative Haley Stevens in the August 4 primary, and the winner will face former Representative Mike Rogers, a formidable GOP candidate who came within roughly 20,000 votes of capturing Michigan’s other Senate seat two years ago.

A 41-year-old doctor, Rhodes Scholar, and former county health director, El-Sayed is running as an unabashed critic of Israel and of corruption in both parties. He begins rallies with a call-and-response incantation of his campaign slogan: “Money out of … politics! Money in your … pocket! Medicare for … all!” I sat down with him after his event in Ann Arbor and asked him to specify the parts of the Democratic brand that he believes are “bullshit.” He began with some of his campaign themes and described Democrats as hypocrites in thrall to corporate donors. “You say you’re for human rights and can’t name a genocide a genocide,” El-Sayed said. “You say you want to give people health care but take money from the people who are keeping us from having health care. You say you want to stand up to Big Tech and take money from Big Tech.”

“What are we actually for?” El-Sayed continued. “Are we just the permanent opposition party where ‘We’re not them’?” Then, referring to Republicans, he added, “At least they’re honest about who they are, for the most part.”

This message should be familiar to those who have watched progressives and democratic socialists topple establishment favorites in New York City, Colorado, and Maine over the past several months. But Michigan is a state that Trump carried in 2024, and many Democrats fear that nominating a candidate who calls for abolishing ICE and establishing a single-payer health-care system is too big a risk in such a crucial year for the party. El-Sayed is also seeking to be the first Muslim senator at a time when some Republicans are fomenting unrestrained Islamophobia. A poll released on Tuesday found Stevens running even with Rogers while El-Sayed trailed him by 10 points in a hypothetical general-election matchup.

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El-Sayed’s confidence can border on cockiness—some Democrats see his strident attacks on Stevens as demeaning or even sexist—and he has leaned into the electability debate. Ahead of the 2028 presidential race, he and his progressive supporters view the Michigan contest as an opportunity to extinguish what they see as stale Democratic beliefs about the types of candidates that can win in swing states. “This is just a different time, and this time calls for different kinds of candidates,” El-Sayed told me. “I hope that coming out of this election, the question of electability is no longer asked and interpreted in the same way.”

He turns the argument back against Stevens, who has trailed in many polls despite benefiting from more than $60 million worth of ads bolstering her candidacy and attacking El-Sayed (about half of it coming from AIPAC). “If you can’t get elected without $60 million being spent for you, you can’t get elected. I’m so sorry,” El-Sayed said.

The progressives’ chief data point is Trump’s 2024 win, which they interpret not as an endorsement of the president’s vision but as a rejection of Democrats and the political system more broadly. “You know what people hate more than Trump? Politics as usual. They hate politics as usual so much that they were willing to take Trump, warts and all,” El-Sayed told me. “So what happens if you offer them something that’s not politics as usual and isn’t a megalomaniacal billionaire narcissist? Well, let’s see.”

Stevens is in many ways the quintessential swing-state Democratic Senate candidate. A former Obama-administration official who worked on the auto-rescue task force during his first term, she won a Republican-held House seat in the Detroit suburbs in 2018. Her trajectory is broadly similar to that of Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official who was elected to Congress in 2018 and then narrowly defeated Rogers in the 2024 Senate race.

In the House, Stevens has distinguished herself mostly through her loyalty to the Democratic leadership. She provided a reliable vote for President Biden’s major initiatives and enthusiastically backed his 2024 reelection bid even after many in the party were calling for him to drop out.

Stevens’s campaign for Senate is well funded but also exceedingly conventional. She emphasizes her Michigan roots, her ties to Obama, and what she’s done for the state in Congress. Taking aim at El-Sayed’s personal wealth, Stevens likes to point out that she’s the only Senate candidate who’s not a millionaire, and she criticized him repeatedly for not releasing a complete financial disclosure. (He released it just before their final debate this week; it showed he’s worth as much as $2.1 million and earned income from a rental property his wife owns in Dubai.)

Still, Stevens has not been able to generate the same amount of energy as El-Sayed, nor does she seem desperate to try. Over my three days in Michigan, he held at least eight events across the southern part of the state; she publicized just two, and her campaign declined to make her available for an interview. (It has helped El-Sayed that, unlike Stevens, he does not have to juggle campaigning with an important day job: “I’m Abdul. I’m 41, I’m unemployed, and I spend my time asking people for money,” El-Sayed joked to the students in Ann Arbor as he introduced himself.)

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Polling in the race has been murky. Surveys conducted by groups aligned with El-Sayed’s campaign have shown him up by double digits, as did an independent poll released today. But a Detroit News poll earlier this month found Stevens leading by nearly seven points. Supporters of Stevens had hoped the early-July exit of a third major candidate, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, would help her consolidate support. But one of McMorrow’s most prominent backers, Senator Elizabeth Warren, campaigned with El-Sayed over the weekend.

With El-Sayed holding strong, Michigan’s most prominent Democrats have rallied behind Stevens in a bid to deny him the nomination. This spring, former Senator Debbie Stabenow endorsed Stevens. Then, soon after McMorrow dropped out, Stevens gained the endorsement of the retiring Peters, a former chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee who had earlier indicated he would stay out of the primary to succeed him.

By far the biggest get for Stevens, however, was Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s most popular Democrat, who announced her endorsement last Friday, a day before the start of early voting. Whitmer appeared that afternoon alongside Stevens and another key establishment backer, Representative James Clyburn, at a union rally in Detroit, where Stevens is counting on a big turnout among the city’s Black community. Without mentioning El-Sayed’s name, Whitmer strongly suggested that Stevens would be the stronger general-election candidate. “Michiganders understand better than anyone that our vote has a consequence for every American,” Whitmer said. “We also know that winning Michigan is as tough as it gets. But as someone who won statewide twice, I know Haley is tougher than the environment we’ve got to win in.”

The primary race has turned nasty in its closing weeks, a concern for Democrats hoping that the party can unify to defeat Rogers, who has coasted to the GOP nomination without significant opposition. Stevens’s supporters erupted after El-Sayed implied to Semafor that she could not “string together two coherent sentences.” Soon after, he urged his supporters to stop making fun of Stevens “for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics.” The flap may have helped Stevens find her voice—literally in a certain sense. She has turned her thick Michigan accent into a calling card of authenticity. “Some of you have seen, there’s those cool kids on the internet. They’re doing the cool-kid chatter. Some of them might be the coastal elites making fun of how I talk,” she told the crowd in Detroit, which laughed loudly. “They’re thinking they’re better than us. And what they don’t know is I am your voice, and their jokes and their criticism only makes me fight harder.”

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As I talked with voters in Detroit and its suburbs, it seemed apparent that after such a bitter primary, either candidate could struggle to assemble the coalition they would need to win in November. Younger voters filled El-Sayed’s events, and several of them told me they weren’t sure they would support Stevens if she were the nominee. The image painted by El-Sayed of Stevens as a politician beholden to big-money interests had taken hold. “She would depress the youth vote,” Scott Siegal, a 24-year-old student, told me at an El-Sayed rally in Ferndale. If Stevens wins the nomination, he said, “I’d probably just not vote.” Colin Takata, a 27-year-old who works for an audio company, said of Stevens: “It almost feels like she’s a corporation in a trench coat.”

At the Stevens rally, some of her supporters said they found El-Sayed likeable and appealing, but they favored Stevens’s experience and had concerns about his ability to win. “I have nothing against the brother. He’s a nice guy,” Robert Royster, a funeral director in Detroit, told me. “But she has receipts.” Others, however, took offense at El-Sayed’s treatment of Stevens. “From what I’ve heard, I don’t think he likes women,” Tyrone, a former auto worker who declined to give his last name in discussing such a fraught primary, told me.

Long-simmering tensions between the Arab and Black communities in Detroit could also hamper El-Sayed. One of the first attendees I spoke with at the Stevens rally told me he didn’t care for El-Sayed in part because he doesn’t like Arab people. He was not the only person at the event who expressed such prejudice. Tyrone Carter, a state representative from Detroit backing Stevens, acknowledged the Arab-Black tensions in the city. “They’re real, and they exist,” he told me at the rally.

Some of the nation’s most popular progressives have come to Michigan to campaign with El-Sayed, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (as well as Warren). But an endorsement he values as highly as any of those has come from a Democrat with a far lower national profile, at least for now: Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. El-Sayed told me he wants to see Van Hollen replace Schumer as the Democratic leader in the Senate; Van Hollen says he’s “kicking the tires” on a 2028 presidential run instead, though he has notably not told El-Sayed to stop promoting him for the Senate leadership.

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As a chair of the Democratic campaign committee first in the House and then, more recently, in the Senate, Van Hollen was responsible for recruiting candidates in the party’s toughest races. Many of those picks looked and sounded a lot more like Stevens than El-Sayed.

But Van Hollen has become one of the Senate’s staunchest critics of Israel, and he told me the Trump era has changed his view about electability. “I think people want somebody who’s going to rock the boat,” he said, pointing to the election of “a convicted felon” to the presidency. “I think Donald Trump’s election was a symptom of a deeper unrest among voters. That unrest is real.” When I asked him if he agreed with El-Sayed’s assessment that the Democratic Party’s brand is “bullshit,” Van Hollen did not repeat the word, but he didn’t dispute it, either.

Were he to win in November, El-Sayed would be the most progressive candidate elected in a swing state in modern times, but he keeps some space between himself and the leftward bound of today’s Democrats. He is not a democratic socialist, and when the question comes up, his position hews closer to Elizabeth Warren than to Bernie Sanders. “I think that capitalism is, when it actually works, an efficient way to allocate resources,” El-Sayed told me. “It’s not working right now.”

“I know that the establishment desperately wants to turn me into a DSA candidate,” he went on. “I’m just not, and it bothers them so much.” El-Sayed is right about that. Neither his Democratic critics nor the Republicans who seem to be awaiting his nomination with glee are apt to make that distinction for Michigan voters. And if he defeats Stevens next week, the general election will test just how far the progressive movement can advance in this political era. It’s an opportunity that El-Sayed and his supporters have been waiting years to grab.