CAUSE FOR ALARM.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

One night a year ago, Aaron Friedman, a twenty-five-year-old classical-music composer and jazz saxophonist, was awakened, as he often had been, by the bleating ostinato of a car alarm. His apartment, in Washington Heights, looked onto a five-way intersection. There was a restaurant downstairs, and a post office and a bodega across the street, and, as a result, so much pedestrian and automobile traffic that the cars parked nearby were constantly being jostled into song. The block, Friedman had come to believe, was car-alarm central.

In a rage, Friedman went online. "I started doing research about car alarms and discovered that they were totally useless in preventing...

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