The blight of public noise from Bluetooth speakers. Yes, I’m talking to you, asshole.

(Getty Images)

If I were to imagine a scenario in which I did something that could put me in jail for life, it would probably be on the lines of one recent resident of the Bronx, Shaun Piles. Ms Piles, after a series of escalating fights with her next-door neighbor over the loudness of his music at all hours of the day and night, stabbed him multiple times with a kitchen knife when he was keeping her awake at 2 am — finally losing what was left of her shit.

To which I can only say of the now-imprisoned martyr: Free Shaun Piles!

There is something about being forcibly exposed to someone else’s choice in loud music that makes me lose my shit as well. It got so bad a few years back that I talked to my shrink about it. I wasn’t just irritated, annoyed, or put out by it. I was instantly full of blind, hateful rage. My rational faculties would desert me, and I’d find myself yelling at strangers in public, which is something I usually only do online.

What is it about this relatively minor problem in the grand scheme of things? I’m a pretty congenial person in public usually, with some English reserve. My shrink suggested it was about my years of living with a dictatorial father. I continued to overreact to situations where I was completely powerless, she suggested, and unable to escape. There was something to that, I think. I’m extremely independent-minded as an adult, and bristle at being pushed around.

But I’m also a bit of a hippie, a meditator who from childhood on loved just being contemplative in nature, in silence, or actually listening to the subtler sounds of the non-human world. So when two of the most cherished oases in my life for three decades — my local Meridian Hill Park in DC, and the remote Herring Cove Beach outside Provincetown — became saturated with the noise of others these last few years, I was bound to get upset.

The modern world is noisy, I get that. I’m fine dealing with busy, urban places. But that surely makes those other places where you can escape the noise all the more vital in the constant struggle for sanity in this century. This is perhaps the one issue on which uber-leftist Elie Mystal and I agree. He found himself this week in a waiting room, full of peeps “listening to content on their devices with no headphones… LOUDLY. What the SHIT is this?? Is this normal?” His peroration: “I’M DEAD. I CAN FOR REAL FEEL THE VEINS IN MY HEAD THROBBING. THIS IS HOW I DIED.” #MeToo, my old lefty comrade.

The degradation of public space in America isn’t entirely new, of course. As soon as transistor radios became portable, people would carry them around — for music or sports scores on construction sites or wherever. But the smartphone era — thanks once again, Steve Jobs, you were so awesome! — gave us an exponential jump in the number of people with highly portable sound-broadcasting machines in every public space imaginable. In other words: Hell on toast.

At the beginning of this phone surge, a term was even coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public: “sodcasting” — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. Sodcasting was just an amuse bouche, though, compared with our current Bluetooth era, where amplifiers the size of golf-balls have dialed it all up to 11, and the age of full-spectrum public cacophony — including that thump-thump-thump of the bass that carries much farther than the sodcasting treble — has truly begun.

National parks? They are now often intermittent raves, where younger peeps play loud, amplified dance music as they walk their trails. On trains? There is now a single “quiet car” when once they all were, because we were a civilized culture. Walk down a street and you’ll catch a cyclist with a speaker attached to the handlebars, broadcasting at incredible volume for 50 feet ahead and behind him, obliterating every stranger’s conversation in his path.

On a bus? Expect the person sitting right behind you with her mouth four inches from your ears to have a very loud phone conversation, with the speaker turned up, and the phone held in front of her like a waiter holding a platter. The things she’ll tell you! Go to a beach and have your neighbors play volleyball — but with a loud speaker playing Kylie Minogue remixes to generate “atmosphere”.

When did we decide we didn’t give a fuck about anyone else in public anymore?

It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.

What could be the defense? The Guardian — who else? — had a go at it:

“the ghetto blaster reminds us that defiantly and ostentatiously broadcasting one’s music in public is part of a history of sonically contesting spaces and drawing the lines of community, especially through what gets coded as ‘noise’ … it represents a liberation of music from the private sphere in the west, as well as an egalitarian spreading of music in the developing world.”

The first point is not, it seems to me, exculpatory. It’s describing an act of territorial aggression through sound. The second point may have some truth to it — but it hardly explains the super-privileged NYC homos on the beach or the white twenty-something NGO employees in the park. But would I enjoy living in Santo Domingo where not an inch — so far as I could see and hear when I was there — was uncontaminated by overheard fluorescent lights and loud, bad club music? Nope.

Whenever I’ve asked the sonic sadists whether they actually understand that they are hurting others, they blink a few times, their mouths begin to form sentences, and then they look away. Or they’ll tell me to go fuck myself, or say I’m the only one who has complained, which is probably true because most people don’t want public confrontation, and have simply given up and moved on. Then there is often the implication that I’m the one being the asshole. On no occasion has anyone ever turned their music off after being asked to. Too damaging to their pride.

One reddit forum-member had this excuse: “It’s because earbuds hurt my ears and headphones don’t stay on.” Another got closer: “A lot of people that play their music out loud think that others won’t mind it.” Self-absorption. One other factor is simply showing off: at Herring Cove, rich douchefags bring their expensive boats a little off-shore so they can broadcast with their massive sound systems. It strengthens my support for the Second Amendment every summer.

What is there to be done? One woman on a bus tried howling like a dog to compete with the noise. Another option is to get your own boombox or Bluetooth and blast it even louder. Some places have penalties — up to 4,000 euros for beachgoers in Portugal! — for loud public music. A grassroots campaign in London fought to revoke the free bus passes of Bluetoothers but had to settle for mandatory signs: “Turn it off: Keep it down.” One national monument in California has also begun to put up signs banning amplified music: “If we don’t start thinking about this now, children of the future will never know what a natural quiet peaceful setting sounds like,” explained one park official. But who will ever enforce this? It’s all but impossible without a baseline level of public decency that fewer and fewer Americans seem to have.

Maybe we could sue on the grounds of hurting people with “ADHD, chronic fatigue, tinnitus, autism, anxiety and misophonia,” who are particularly vulnerable to the assholes. Or try pointing out the environmental impact: “Urban and industrial noise can also change the timing of birds’ songs, suppress the complexity of their calls, and prevent them from finding mates.” Protect the piping plovers from Dua Lipa!

Then there’s the more satisfying dark side. You can try to jam Bluetooth systems from close by; you can hijack them; you can even try and fashion an EMP Generator from a disposable camera and destroy the speakers entirely if you get close enough. There is also the simpler option of murdering every single one them, of course, as I’ve mentioned. But I have to say I’m not optimistic that even this will work.

I’m not against all music outdoors. Concerts, acoustic guitars, drum circles: go for it, at specific times and places. My local park has a drum circle every Sunday afternoon, and it’s communal, not amplified, and makes me super happy. But this kind of moderation — music without speakers, while respecting neighbors — seems beyond many.

The younger generation — the most fucked-up and miserable of our lifetimes — knows everything about white supremacy in bird watching, but they have no idea what basic manners are. When everyone is playing the main character — and in Gen Z, they all are — no one else matters. And when you have become used to performing in public in every area of online life, adding a soundtrack to every Insta-story, you see little wrong in one more act of self-regard in the actual physical presence of strangers: showing the world how cool your world is by forcing others to live in it.

New On The Dishcast: Richard Dawkins

Richard is an evolutionary biologist, author, and public speaker. From 1995 to 2008 he was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and he’s currently a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his many bestselling books are the The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and his two-part autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and A Brief Candle in the Dark. He also has substack called The Poetry of Reality — check it out and subscribe!

A pioneering New Atheist, Dawkins is a passionate defender of science and denigrator of religion. Who better to talk to about God? Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on whether faith is necessary for meaning, and which religion is the worst. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with Abigail Shrier on kids in therapy, as well as the ever-popular talk with Christian Wiman. Plus more reader debate over the transqueer movement, and I respond at length.

Money Quotes For The Week

“Net worth is at all-time highs. Stock prices are at all-time highs. Housing prices are at all-time highs. Economic activity is at all-time highs. Air travel is at all-time highs. You can earn 5% on your cash. I know people don’t like good news but this is the Roaring Twenties (without the vibes),” – Ben Carlson, wealth manager.

“Let us beware of the danger of pursuing a Socratic goal with the means, and the temper, of Thrasymachus,” – Leo Strauss.

“Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move,” – Matt Cole.

“BEGINS IN 15 MIN! Vaginal Sex for Gay Men by Boy Madura Onyx. Class eliminates concerns or hesitations about sex & play w/ vaginas. Highlights basics of vagina, sexual play, & the transitional changes for some transfolk w/ vaginas,” – a class at a leather convention teaching gay men how to have sex with biological women. Co-sponsored by the Vatican and the Family Research Council.

“One of the things that disturbed me most during my time as president of Harvard was the realization that I was the first Ivy League president in 30 years to attend an ROTC commissioning ceremony, which reflected the degree of estrangement between universities and the people who risk their lives to protect us,” – Larry Summers.

“The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and really easy to lose,” – Jonathan Haidt.

The Reality Of Maoism

That’s a screenshot from the must-see opening scene from the new Netflix series, “3 Body Problem” (the clip is un-embeddable on Substack). Check it out. It’s so incredibly rare to see depictions of Maoism’s Cultural Revolution in Western popular culture — along with Stalin’s. I’ll never forget seeing a student at Harvard when I was there wearing a Mao cap to lunch every day. I asked him if he’d be prepared to were a swastika as well. And of course he wouldn’t.

The atrocities of Maoism — often perpetrated by the fanatical young against their elders — is light-years away in seriousness from our wokeness imposition. But the principle of correcting wrongthink and humiliating dissenters is the same. And it’s foul.

Dissents Of The Week

A reader writes:

Thank you for the superbly written piece, “Transqueers Take The Mask Off,” which illuminates the absurdities of queer ideology, particularly as it pertains to childhood transition. However, I must take serious issue with one aspect of this piece. You wrote, “Did anyone inquire what exactly Chu means by ‘changing sex,’ when that is of course impossible at a cellular level?” Elsewhere you use the terms “sex change” and “sex reassignment.” But it is, in fact, impossible to change sex at any level. Sex is real; it is binary; and it is immutable. These are basic, biological facts.

This is not a semantic quibble, but a concern that is central to the debate over transgender medicine. Telling children, or leading them to believe, or allowing them to believe, that they can change sex, in any sense, is a cruel lie. Corinna Cohn (of the Heterodox podcast, and a trans woman) has compared telling this lie to a transitioning child to putting them into a boat and casting them adrift without any possibility that they will reach the other shore. A far more accurate term that some have been using is “sex trait modification.” It may seem like a minor point, but we have arrived at this parlous state of affairs by rowing away from the truth. It’s up to us to row back the boat.

Sex reassignment is the most accurate term. No man will ever function as a woman and vice-versa. Maybe in some future science fiction world it will be possible. But not yet. And certainly not now.

Criticism of a very different sort:

Thank you for posting some of my reader dissents recently. I hope I am not the only trans reader you have left! I haven’t read Judith Butler’s book yet, so I don’t feel in a position to comment more broadly, but I think you are miscategorizing Butler and other queer theorists as claiming that sexual dimorphism does not not result in two generally different manifestations of the human body. The point they are trying to make is not that biological differences do not exist; it’s that those differences do not matter as much as anti-trans ideologues would like everyone to believe they do.

Yes, sex is constructed on top of biology, by society. We know this, because if you pick any random person in the world and ask them what it means to be a man or a woman, they are going to have an answer based on their own social (and linguistic) context. I can assure you that the vast majority of people are not going to be giving some pretentious scientific treatise on gametes. Aside from people actively engaged in the study of biology, the only people who care about that level of detail are transphobes clinging to “objective truth” to shield themselves from the critique of bigotry. The average person does not concern themselves with the biological differences per se. What matters more on a day-to-day basis is how those differences have resulted in social structures that directly affect their lives.

If we have structured parts of society around biological differences, and those structures suck for some people, then perhaps we can restructure in ways that suck less. Authoritarians hate the idea of people having autonomy, which is why they clamp down so strongly against these ideas. There used to be a libertarian wing of conservatism that might have embraced the idea that people have the freedom to build a society that works better, but I guess that’s gone now, subsumed by the reactionary wing that refuses to even conceive of it.

Our society has been prepared to re-structure itself to minimize gender discomfort: by allowing for adult sex reassignment at will, and for preventing discrimination on the basis of sex reassignment. The only compromises proposed are around the difference in athletic abilities between men and women, the rights of women and girls not to be exposed to naked males, and the protection of children from irreversible treatments they cannot meaningfully consent to. The fact that this is not good enough — in fact, referred to as “genocide” by these activists — shows you the real goal of the transqueer agenda: the removal of the sex binary from public life and law. Butler never tells us of a case when sex would take precedence over gender, because, despite her deliberate obfuscation, she cannot conceive of one.

Another reader is tired of all the trans stuff:

If for no other reason than variety’s sake, can you take a couple of months off from the gender theory screeds (and, better yet, the whole topic of wokeness in general)? No one’s trying to muzzle you here, but let’s be honest: your latest column provided absolutely nothing new beyond what you’ve already said a million times before. It’s the same arguments, the same statistics, the same stock phrases (“transing,” “neo-Marxism,” etc.) every time. It’s just so predictable at this point. When I read the Andrea Long Chu piece a few days ago, I said to myself, “Welp! I know what this week’s Dish is going to cover.”

Challenge yourself, man! Those of use who faithfully read the Dish for so many years in its daily incarnation appreciated its breathtaking variety. I think you could do more to inject some more range into the weekly version beyond the familiar “wokeness bad/Biden old/Trump deranged” refrains.

There’s always more variety when you’re posting 30 times a day, as on the old Daily Dish. But I still got very similar emails back then telling me to stop going on about marriage equality, or torture, or the Iraq War, or Obama, or cannabis legalization. So, yes, I go on crusades occasionally, because I think they matter. But I take the point about variety, and if Butler and Chu hadn’t appeared simultaneously, I might have put it off for another week.

Here are the topics of the last few Dishes, by the way: Biden’s State of the Union, Google’s AI experiment, Navalny’s courage and humor, Coleman Hughes’ book on color-blindness, age-limits for public figures, and the revival of Trumpism. That’s not to mention the Dishcasts on therapy, Christian despair, a troubled childhood, Stoicism and the Founders, gambling, the prosecution of Trump, and the revival of Christianity, to take the last few months. We take the mix of the Dish seriously.

Another chides me for using a French term:

Sacre bleu, Andrew! You marred your column with another needless Gallicism this week. Remember your Orwell!

Merde. More dissents are over on the pod page. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

Frozen turtles thaw for spring — miraculous:

In The ‘Stacks

• Can the gold-plated Trump cough up $454 million? He’s reduced to peddling sneakers.
• On Schumer’s speech over Israel, Joe Klein applauds, Beinart is encouraged, and Erickson is aghast. It was, indeed, a belated milestone.
• Ukraine’s gambit in the Russian election has backfired, says Stephen Bryen.
• As illegal migration surges, crime is dropping.
• As polls tighten, Brian Beutler musters the best case for a Biden victory.
• Barro breaks down the big policy questions for the coming election.
• Fani Willis gets off.
• Scotland’s hate crime bill “comes into effect on April Fool’s Day, but this is no laughing matter.”
• Why is Haiti such a shit-show?
• As Kate Middleton shrinks, Ed West is changing his monarchist mind.
• Is Sydney Sweeney’s major boobage calming the culture wars?
• Classic Freddie on the “commodification of queer culture.”
• Katherine Dee gawks at Gen Z: “sexual orientation no longer has anything to do with who you actually have sex with.”
• Paul Waldman left the WaPo to join Substack. James Carville and Al Hunt are also aboard. Compact, too, is on the platform. Vive la resistance!

The View From Your Window Contest

Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you next Friday.

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