As civic life came to a grinding halt this spring, with cities in lockdown around the world, the vivacious cacophony of urban life dulled to a quiet murmur, overcome only by the wail of ambulance sirens cutting through empty streets. Several months on, the trauma and alarm of that sound rings on heavily, with a delicate unease, in our hearts and minds. “Every alarm signals a person in crisis, and that person’s fate is inevitably bound to the fates of others—family and friends. It is a noise that deserves moral attention,” as Siri Hustvedt wrote in a beautiful Financial Times essay in late April. “I have come to think of the sirens as the city’s heartbreaking music, a high-pitched dirge that accompanies the number in the newspaper every day.”