Welcome to CLAMOR, a newsletter about how noise took over the world and how we can take it back. This newsletter is an extension of my book with the same name, which will be published in May 2025 (and can be preordered here).

For too long, we’ve mismeasured and misunderstood noise, exacerbating the harm it causes to our hearing, our minds, our overall health, and our environment. By reducing the noise problem to loudness and seeking quiet as the only solution, we’ve missed countless opportunities to not only prevent noise problems but to cultivate soundscapes that improve our focus, reduce our stress, and generally make our lives easier rather than harder.

WHY NOISE?

I’ve been a journalist for more than a quarter century, working as a staff editor at the Atlantic and Mother Jones, and as a freelancer covering everything from unsolved murders to climate engineering to artificial intelligence in schools for national publications such as the New York Times, Politico, Popular Science, the Washington Post, and Wired. I’m drawn to issues with an inherent complexity, which defy easy answers and black-and-white arguments. Noise is one of those issues, and it’s one that we’ve oversimplified much to our detriment.

While reporting my first noise article, for the Boston Globe Sunday magazine in 2018, the people I interviewed who thought a lot about noise tended to fall into two camps—those who warned of a serious, growing, and overlooked public-health threat requiring stricter regulations, and those who felt noise concerns were mostly proxy battles for broader cultural conflicts and not really about sound at all.

Both sides made points but also seemed stuck in their respective ruts. One was constantly reactive and steeped in a culture of complaint. The other seemed to shrug at the notion that noise causes real harm to people and the planet. On the fringes, however, a third group was emerging that seemed to bridge the gap by taking sound seriously and not just noise. It was this new movement that inspired Clamor.

Researching the book, I met an eclectic mix of folks, including musicians, doctors, architects, ecologists, teachers, and activists, who think that noise is a big problem—maybe bigger than we realize—but also insist that sonic solutions can’t be judged by decibel counts alone.

While extreme loudness is an underappreciated danger to health, there are plenty of noise problems that can’t be solved just by turning down the volume. Hushing the office hubub can actually worsen distractions from stray coworker conversations; hospital alarms fatigue clinicians and put patient safety at risk because the beeps are incessant and difficult to distinguish from each other, regardless of their volume; studies find that traffic noise stress people out, but the same (or greater) decibel level of nature sounds, such as ocean surf or birdsong lowers stress and improves mood.

Clamor pushes the boundaries of noise and calls for a more proactive and holistic approach, beyond whack-a-moling decibels, to not only mitigate noise harms but to understand sound as a potential ally for better health and wellbeing.

WHY THIS NEWSLETTER?

In short, I want to keep the conversation going. I’m a storyteller with insatiable curiosity. But no matter how doggedly I report and how many words I’m allotted, even for a book, I can never tell the whole story.

During the years I worked on Clamor, I left entire chapters on the editing room floor and killed countless darlings (as one must). The people, places, research, and stories featured in its chapters remained frozen in the time of my reporting. I hope the book will spark bigger discussions about noise and soundscapes of our daily lives, and my goal for the newsletter is to fuel those conversations with updates, new ideas, and fresh analysis.

Mindful of all the “noise” hitting your inboxes, we’ll start small, with well-curated monthly installments of intriguing noise news and sound stories that I hope you’ll enjoy and help shape as we go. The newsletter will be completely free for now, although I may start selling paid subscriptions at some point to sustain the work. In the meantime, please spread the word and be in touch with your comments and suggestions about sound and noise issues you’d like to see covered. Thank you so much for reading, and for listening.

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I'm an award-winning science journalist, book author, and former editor at the Atlantic and Mother Jones.