The Screaming City

Two new pieces today focus on a worrisome trend -- extreme noise pollution. In a New York Times cover story entitled A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream, author Michael Slackman writes of extraordinary ambient sound levels in Cairo, "like living with a lawnmower next to you." In the London Times, Stefanie Marsh writes in Noise: the sound and the fury that "Life nowadays -- in shops, bars, cafes; even at home -- is conducted against a background of growing, incessant noise. The stress of it kills 3,000 people a year."