To my grandmother, who has lived her entire life in Italy, gluten-free pasta is “una follia”—nonsense, madness. A twirl of spaghetti or forkful of rigatoni should provide a familiar textural delight: a noodle that is both elastic and firm, holding a distinct, springy shape that your teeth can sink into with some, but not too much, resistance. That is all because of the gluten in wheat.

Upon taste-testing some popular brands of pasta made from ingredients such as rice, corn, and chickpea flour, I understood my grandmother’s doubts. The various noodles retained a firm, if not al dente, shape at the lower end of their packaging’s recommended cook time. But approaching the upper end of the range, the noodles became soft and eventually collapsed; penne ripped in two by the time it was on my fork. Even when the noodles didn’t turn limp, they were almost sticky against my teeth. And the pastas had faint aftertastes: of overcooked rice, of tortilla chips, of chalky chickpeas. When paired with a sauce, these defects were less noticeable—but that means the overall dish worked in spite of, not because of, the underlying noodle.

Yet gluten-free pasta is a billion-dollar industry, so mainstream that you can find multiple kinds in basically every supermarket. (I tasted products from Barilla, Banza, and Garofalo.) Millions of Americans who don’t have celiac disease or gluten intolerance now opt for these products as a “healthier,” higher-protein alternative. Although these products are hardly perfect, growing demand has made them significantly better than what was available a decade ago. Today’s wheatless pasta could be considered a sort of scientific marvel. Ingredient lists don’t reveal the carefully calibrated chemical interactions, and the high-tech extrusion and drying processes, used to manufacture gluten-free noodles at scale. And the future may get even weirder. Tucked away in research labs is a whole other universe of wheat alternatives that are only just beginning to reach grocery stores: pasta made with grape peels and durian seeds and green-mussel powder and artichoke flour and more.

In wheat-based pastas, gluten acts as a scaffold. It forms when two proteins, gliadin and glutenin, bond to create a firm, elastic molecular network. When a noodle cooks, its starches absorb water and expand inside of the gluten to create a plump, toothsome bite. Absent gluten, the starch softens without retaining any structure. “That’s where you get pasta that falls apart,” Viral Shukla, a food scientist at Cornell University, told me, in some cases resembling a polenta-like mush more than a noodle made from traditional semolina wheat.

The task for food engineers, then, has been to approximate the magic of gluten without any wheat. Common alternative flours, such as corn and rice, have little protein of their own and can become more of a paste when they cook. In the 2000s, many gluten-free pasta options were so structureless, they sometimes came already cooked, because they otherwise fell apart upon contact with boiling water. But then gluten avoidance became a health trend and has since stuck around. Only something like 1 percent of Americans has celiac disease, but a growing portion has a gluten sensitivity, and as much as 20 to 30 percent of the country avoids or would like to avoid gluten.

With increased demand came better pastas. “Over the last decade, we’ve seen so many food researchers develop products that aren’t garbage,” Kurt Rosentrater, a food engineer at Iowa State University, told me. Barilla started selling gluten-free pasta in 2013, Banza the following year. Gluten-free pasta products are by now endless. In addition to corn and rice as substitutes for wheat, various chemicals and additives, such as xanthan gum and monoglycerides, can help give a noodle more structure and are used in many popular gluten-free pastas. Precooking the ingredients can help too: Heating rice or corn flour beforehand, or the resulting dough while it is extruded through a machine to mold the pasta shape, creates a starch network that approximates the properties of gluten. Heat treatment is part of what makes rice noodles, such as those used in Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese dishes, bouncy and satisfying to chew without gluten.

Some of the end products have graduated from tolerable to genuinely decent. My best experience came the day after my at-home taste test, when I headed to Senza Gluten, a gluten-free Italian restaurant in Manhattan that imports its noodles from an Italian manufacturer that uses corn flour. “You have to cook it slightly differently to make it al dente; you have to be more careful to make sure the pasta doesn’t break,” Teona Khaindrava, the owner and a co-founder, told me. Those skills showed: The restaurant’s fettuccine bolognese retained a surprising chew, and the meat-forward sauce masked any aftertaste. The noodles were a bit softer, and broke apart more easily than those made with semolina, but they were better than the gluten-free pasta boiled in my kitchen. Many consider the restaurant’s pasta a proper al dente.

Another common technique to improve wheatless pasta is to add protein. Whereas corn and rice flour have long been staples of wheatless pasta, the past several years have seen the rise of products containing chickpeas, red lentils, egg whites, peas, quinoa, and a bunch of other ingredients that aren’t standard wheat replacements. Because gluten is made of protein, adding different proteins as a substitute for gluten can help give the noodles more structure.

In addition to improving mouthfeel, a lot of that experimentation “is to enhance the nutritional properties, because gluten-free products are missing protein,” Joan King, a food scientist at Louisiana State University, told me. America’s love of protein and loathing for carbohydrates, in other words, is changing the pastas on grocery-store shelves—and has paradoxically targeted wheat’s major protein source. “Now people are like, ‘Oh, I don’t want gluten, but I want high protein.’ Well, gluten is the protein,” Shukla said. “So how do we remove gluten and add in more protein?” Chickpeas. Lentils. Peas. Beans. In one study, King found that telling people that one rice-flour pasta was high in protein increased their intent to purchase by as much as 14 percent.

One of the most visible gluten-free pasta brands, Banza, doesn’t prominently advertise itself in terms of gluten. The company’s bright-orange boxes emphasize the main ingredient, chickpeas, as high-protein, high-fiber, and low-carb. That’s intentional, Brian Rudolph, the company’s CEO and a co-founder, told me: “One of the lowest reasons to purchase is gluten-free,” he said. “Usually it’s about nutrient density.” Those are among the very reasons Rudolph turned to chickpeas when he began developing a gluten sensitivity: They are nutritious and, like many legumes, great for the soil. Given these health and environmental benefits, many consumers can “forgive a 10 percent gap or whatever that you don’t notice in sauce,” Rudolph said. And the company is constantly trying to close that gap in flavor and texture, upgrading its pasta every six to 12 months, he said.

Legumes may soon seem like the least outlandish ingredient making its way into pasta: Can I interest you in pumpkin-seed, broccoli, or yellow-passion-fruit noodles? These and other unorthodox flours, which researchers around the world are testing in noodle recipes, use food by-products that would otherwise go into animal feed or landfills; those by-products can add fiber, protein, and other nutrients into gluten-free pasta, Gabriel Davidov-Pardo, a nutritional food scientist at California State Polytechnic University, in Pomona, told me. Many of those experimental noodles are stuck in labs, difficult to produce at scale and even harder to process through traditional pasta-making factory equipment. Most “will not get adopted into our homes or into the mass market,” Shukla said.

But some might. Banza’s chickpea noodles, for instance, were once stuck in a similar manufacturing quagmire. Chickpea flour requires very different processing techniques from wheat, or even corn and rice. In 2013, when Rudolph was making chickpea pasta in his kitchen, no comparable products were on the market, and early on, the company struggled to replicate the noodles at industrial quantities. A decade later, Banza is a supermarket staple. And if the experimental food by-products do reach grocery-store pasta aisles, the average person might not even notice. “It usually looks a little different on the packaging,” Shukla said. “So we might say ‘grape-peel extract,’ or maybe it would just be ‘vegetable fiber.’” Okara flour, for instance—a gluten-free pulp by-product of soy milk and tofu—is starting to make its way to grocery stores, Davidov-Pardo said.

Incorporating desiccated mussels and pumpkin seeds into pasta, of course, could introduce aftertastes much stronger than that of corn or chickpeas. The last thing you want is a bowl of carbonara that has a sulfurous whiff of asparagus. Aside from improving structure and texture, another step in the quest for a better gluten-free pasta will be to eliminate those flavors, Davidov-Pardo told me. Food scientists will need to “find ways through fermentation and other techniques to reduce the intrinsic taste of some of these products,” he said, “so that you can have a pasta made out of chickpea flour or lentils that does not take like hummus or a lentil soup.” This work of designing and manufacturing wheatless pasta isn’t cheap: One recent study found that gluten-free products cost 183 percent more than similar wheat-based ones. Pasta and bread are so essential to the Italian diet that the country’s government gives people with celiac food vouchers.

Yet so many considerations other than flavor, texture, or even cost—protein content, what diet is in vogue, maybe even the environment—have determined the direction of gluten-free pasta that the next hit ingredient might depend less on any clear metric, such as rigidity and affordability, than Americans’ notoriously fickle palates. “This is the year of millets; a couple of years ago was the year of quinoa,” Rosentrater, from Iowa State, said. Shortly before then began the rise of chickpeas. Many consumers already opt for products that probably make for less enjoyable meals than wheat pasta, and will likely continue to do so. Maybe rejecting semolina is not folly but a sign of shifting priorities. The ingredients in gluten-free pasta, like those of many snack foods, can more quickly adapt to health fads than those in wheat pasta. Nevertheless, a heaping plate of durian-seed rigatoni is unlikely to change my grandmother’s mind.

Frank Zappa was an unruly figure of 1960s rock, a free-speech advocate and devout parodist defined by his opposition to authority. His albums assembled the bones of rock and roll into an idiosyncratic style coursing with disbelief at just about every aspect of the American zeitgeist: hippies, cars, college, drugs, California, and, eventually, yuppies. He also hated record labels, government, and the police, positions stoked by a brief jail stint at age 24 due to charges of “conspiracy to commit pornography,” after an undercover vice cop entrapped him into making a fake, audio-only sex tape. The experience changed his life: Zappa became as vehement in his morals as he was flamboyant in his presentation, a wide-eyed, comically bearded Lady Justice weighing the country’s dark side against its silliness.

Of his 100-plus albums, none distills his sardonicism quite like the newly reissued Over-Nite Sensation, a 1973 LP with his band the Mothers of Invention. It’s not Zappa’s most influential work—his 1966 debut, Freak Out!, basically invented the concept album, incorporating consistent characters and ad-libs from a whiny teenage narrator Zappa treated as a symbol of American conformity. But Over-Nite Sensation is his most inviting listen, forging a muscular, funk-inflected sound that couches the denseness of his more avant-garde music in pop hooks. Meanwhile, Zappa’s lyrics scrutinized his then-youthful fan base, caricaturing the counterculture with the cartoonish strokes of a melodic R. Crumb. Over-Nite Sensation is a triumph: a concentrated digest from perhaps the most popular stretch of his career, and a freeze-frame of his compositional flowering and ingenious lyrical ribaldry.

The young folks who populate these songs are not murderous world leaders, savage real-estate moguls, corrupt executives, or any of the other high-powered heels who Zappa pilloried when he became a television pundit during the last stretch of his life. They’re urban scenesters who dream of moving to Montana because they want to grow dental floss, and woo-woo romantics who talk about amulets and tarot cards as a form of foreplay. Zappa was ensconced in a milieu of groupies, hangers-on, and general weirdos in his Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon, and the characters in Over-Nite Sensation are equal parts risible and innocent, occupying a surreal world of youthful fantasy. The album’s lyrics made a cutting statement about the flimsy values of its time—and the songs themselves were a tightly wound coil of Zappa’s musical ideas.

Over-Nite Sensation leads with its sense of humor and its equally waggish arrangements. The speed of the Mothers’ rhythms, and the fact that many of Zappa’s busiest parts are played on atypical rock instruments such as the marimba or the vibraphone, can make his music itself sound funny—he sends up symphonic largesse with his thoroughly rehearsed yet gleefully preposterous ensemble. But the Mothers’ melodies are gorgeous, and Zappa’s lyrics lucid. There are vibrant allegories for the evils of television (“I’m the Slime”) and songs that offer whimsical imagery to match the sparkling weave of electric guitar, reeds, horns, and pitched percussion (“Camarillo Brillo” and “Zomby Woof”). Zappa prods at a ludicrous cast of early-’70s hipsters, suggesting that their sense of authenticity is based on thin visions of consumerism. “Is that a real poncho?” he asks in a sultry baritone during the glammed-out “Camarillo Brillo,” wherein a starry-eyed narrator recounts his one-night stand with a hippie lover. During so many of his ad-libs, Zappa sounds like a parody of sleazy TV presenters. Here, we can’t tell whether he’s playing himself or someone trying to gatekeep participation in the counterculture: “I mean, is that a Mexican poncho, or a Sears poncho?”

The madcap narrative of “Dinah-Moe Humm” is beloved by Zappa-tistas thanks to its bawdiness: A marvel of cracked logic, the track follows a woman who bets a man “a $40 bill” that he can’t make her orgasm, losing the money when her sister hooks up with him instead. The song’s honky-tonk piano feels like period Rolling Stones; Zappa’s loping, singsong phrasing places it in the wide vernacular of Americana. But the lyrics mock everyone and everything—including the three lovers, Zappa’s folksy argot, and, implicitly, those who respond positively to its pitch-perfect rock pastiche. Tina Turner and the Ikettes provide backing vocals, as campy as Turner’s later appearance in the rock flick Tommy. “Got a spot that gets me hot,” she sings, “and you ain’t been to it.”

Eventually, the scope of Zappa’s satire widens: Both this track and the following one, “Montana,” transform into an advertisement for an absurd consumer product (Zircon-encrusted tweezers). This zaniness evokes John Waters, a filmmaker with a shock value to match Zappa’s. The latter, however, is much more likely to be mistaken for his characters, a symptom of the misconception that songwriting, unlike directing movies, is necessarily confessional. In this composer’s case—and for so many musicians—reading autobiography into his lyrics is a mistake. Even Zappa’s long hair and beard, which resembled a fermata, were conceivably more farcical than personally expressive. As layered as he was ostentatious, Zappa never wanted to let us into his mind. His dead seriousness about music didn’t mean he filled it with his feelings or convictions—lyrically, his songs were like wind chimes in the crosscurrents of the American id, twinkling along to the country’s breezes.

Today, it’s easy to think of Zappa as a simple provocateur. Satire has become a tough gambit: Since Donald Trump’s election, the type of authority figures who Zappa used to deride have become crushingly obvious and too scary for humorous scorn to land its punches. Scandalizing for its own sake has run its course, and comedic music seems like the province of very online teenagers or novelty acts (or both)—not the kind of material that a brilliant, if cheeky, composer excavates for their entire career.

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But Zappa’s satire is so effective because his music sharpened alongside it. In the 1980s, he stopped entertaining pop sensibilities as he turned to writing instrumental guitar compositions, symphonic pieces, and music for a digital synthesizer called the synclavier. Much of this work felt like an extension of the mischievous energy that Zappa had harnessed for decades, and it continued to unveil new degrees of his absurdity—and his righteous fury. Zappa accused racists and homophobes of enabling the AIDS pandemic on his courageous, often puerile 1984 fake Broadway cast recording, Thing-Fish, and he never targeted the young quite like he did those ’70s kids. There were, to be sure, bigger fish to fry.

In the ’80s, he also played a complicated role in public discourse: Zappa became a pop intellectual, like the devious offspring of the writers Gore Vidal or William F. Buckley, adapting to this role rather quickly because of the years he had already spent in the spotlight. Though his music was fastened to his sense of humor, Zappa was more of a moralist than a troll. He wanted to push society away from a cultural and civic stupidity based in valuing “the bottom line”—a condition that he felt had afflicted America long enough ago that the youths he lampooned on Over-Nite Sensation were born with it. Today, the country is speeding faster and faster in the direction that Zappa anticipated. Politics has grown progressively difficult to distinguish from reality TV, artists are underfunded, and the so-called culture industries have become even more brazen about valuing profit over quality.

Like much satire, Zappa’s catalog endures because it both criticizes and stands outside clear-cut stances. His songs don’t preach; he defined himself by what he found worth ridiculing, and he always worked in contrasts, swathing his acerbic, flippant lyrics within serpentine music. Zappa’s best albums, among them Over-Nite Sensation, exposed a wider and more dangerous consciousness than his own, which listeners could disregard at their peril: the fickle, perverse mind of America as a whole.

Before our first child was born last year, my wife and I often deliberated about the kind of parents we wanted to be—and the kind we didn’t. We watched families at restaurants sitting in silence, glued to their phones, barely taking their eyes off the screens between bites. We saw children paw at their parents, desperate to interact, only to be handed an iPad to keep quiet. We didn’t want to live like that. We vowed to be present with one another, at home and in public. We wanted our child to watch us paying attention to each other and to him.

The reality, after our son was born, was quite different. In those sleep-deprived early days, I found myself resorting to my phone as a refuge from the chaos. I fell into some embarrassing middle-aged-dad stereotypes. I developed a bizarre interest in forums about personal finance and vintage hats. I spent up to four hours a day looking at my phone while right in front of me was this new, beautiful life, a baby we had dreamed about for years.

My wife, Cristina, felt abandoned in the isolation of new motherhood and complained of my near-constant phone use.

“When you look at your phone,” she told me, “it’s as though you disappear.”

When it comes to having an unhealthy relationship with technology, I’m in good company. Most of us find that smartphones have made our lives better, but we struggle to use them in healthy ways. Nearly 60 percent of American adults told Gallup last year that they use their phones too often. American adults spend an average of four and a half hours on their phones each day, the research firm Insider Intelligence reported this summer. Almost all of us keep our smartphones within arm’s reach during waking hours, Gallup found, and most of us do so when we sleep.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to break a phone addiction]

Such easy and constant access to distraction is having an impact: Overuse harms our sleep and mental health. Constant distraction makes us less productive and can impair our ability to concentrate. Studies have shown that the mere presence of a smartphone can reduce our cognitive ability by taking attention away from other tasks—even if the phone is turned off. A majority of married couples report that their partner’s divided attention has caused strife in their relationship.

On a warm Saturday afternoon this past spring, I reached a breaking point. I had been on my phone for hours a day for the past several weeks. I found myself reaching for the phone whenever there was an opportunity or brief pause in parenting responsibilities. Was this what life was going to be like for the next 30 years? Days filled with a series of small interruptions while I scrolled for scraps of trivia and news?

While our child napped that afternoon, I sat brooding on the porch. I told Cristina that I wasn’t happy with the way we were living and that I didn’t know what to do to get back on track.

“It sounds like we should get rid of the internet,” she told me.

I knew she was right. For years, we had discussed raising our child in a tech-lite home, but we had become so overwhelmed with parenting that this priority had been pushed aside. We had tried half measures before: setting a timer on the Wi-Fi router that shut it off during evening hours, making “no phone” zones in the house. But these were too easy to get around. To achieve what we truly wanted—a home that served as a sanctuary for meaningful family time without distractions—this was the step we needed to take. We talked about how spaces that were once off-limits for technology seemed to dwindle by the day. Our National Parks, public restrooms, even places of worship are now game for digital connection. We felt it was important to have at least one space in our lives that would be set apart. We agreed that our home, the one place where we still had control, would be a fine option.

“When?” I asked.

“Now,” she said.

As Millennials born in the mid-1980s, my wife and I are part of the last generation to have known life before the introduction of widespread home-internet access. We straddle both sides of the digital revolution. We remember answering the telephone without knowing who was calling, showing up at a friend’s house unannounced, what it was like to be lost and bored. In my 20s, I traveled across Europe, Latin America, and Asia for months without a phone, relying only on guidebooks and advice from strangers. I hitchhiked across the American South with a flip phone. I did a stint on a commercial fishing crew in Alaska, which put me completely off the grid for five months without access to a phone or the internet.

Cristina and I had also gone off the grid together earlier in our marriage. In 2018, we moved into a 72-square-foot tiny house we built into a cargo van, where we lived for two years, mostly on public lands and without Wi-Fi. In the wilderness, cellular data were limited, so we logged on only for essentials when we popped back into civilization. It was on the fringes where we first tasted the joy of a life in which the internet was merely a tool.

Without distractions, the days seemed to expand. We learned to harvest time, an idea that came to us in national forests across the U.S. We realized that days undisturbed by digital interruptions made time slow down and improved the quality of our time together. Life was broken down to its most basic elements: Find a place to sleep; cook simple meals to eat; bathe in a river; explore. We promised ourselves that when our time in the van came to an end, we would continue living this way as best we could. (We didn’t, of course; the pandemic started not long after our return to civilization, making the internet feel essential for work and social interaction.)

So yes, we’d had some practice with this before. Surely we could make it work.

But we did need to plan. We live in a log cabin beyond the reach of cell towers in North Carolina’s rural High Country, and up until that point we had relied on Wi-Fi to make phone calls. We might be crazy enough to cut our home off from the internet, but we didn’t want to be completely disconnected. We were trying to relive the ’90s, sure, but not the 1890s. Opting out of the internet would require us to opt in to a landline, which raised even more questions: If we needed to call a doctor, how would we find the phone number? What if we needed an emergency plumber? Turns out, the Yellow Pages still exist. (They’re actually called The Real Yellow Pages, as though dozens of imposter phone books are out there.)

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When the technician from the phone company arrived to put in our landline, I asked him, “Do you install many landlines these days?”

“Mostly just for old people,” he said.

I told him we were doing it in hopes of making our lives simpler. He just nodded as if to say, Sure, man, whatever.

With a couple of twists of his tools, the room filled with a sound I hadn’t heard in ages: a dial tone. That long-forgotten but familiar pitch instantly brought me back to childhood: the anticipation of calling my best friend to ask if he wanted to come outside and play hockey in the street, or the nervous dread in middle school of calling a girl for the first time.

“You know,” the technician said before walking out the door, “most people just use Wi-Fi calling.”

I spent our final morning with internet service on a content binge. I scrolled Twitter. Using a family member’s borrowed password, I pulled up one final movie on Netflix: This Is the End. Halfway through the first act, Seth Rogen and James Franco suddenly froze on the screen. The house went quiet. We were officially disconnected.

Like any form of withdrawal, the first days offline required adjustment. With nowhere to scroll, I developed a voracious appetite for words. I had downloaded digital versions of magazines to an iPad and loaded my nightstand with books from the library. I devoured them all, and started reading anything I could get my hands on.

Over time, the racing pace of a mind that had been hooked on content slowed down. I began to read deeply, sometimes for hours, consuming complex works that I would have struggled to focus on before.

While reading news articles, I still felt an old tug to share links through social media. But now there was no one to share them with. I was reading purely for reading’s sake, sharing an intimate moment with no one but the author. It made reading and thinking a private act, without any temptation to be performative in sharing my opinions. Reading through entire publications, instead of finding stories through a social-media algorithm that fed me a narrow range of content it thought I would enjoy, exposed me to a broader range of opinions, viewpoints, and types of stories. It made me a better consumer of news.

At the end of the first week, my phone reported that my screen time had plummeted by 80 percent. I had reclaimed several hours a day, time that I used to play games with my son, cook elaborate meals, engage in uninterrupted work, and take long walks with my family. Sometimes I just sat and thought, a radical act in our hustle culture. I daydreamed, letting my mind travel where it pleased with no agenda or direction. I realized that it had been years since I’d last allowed myself to do, well, nothing.

Friends and family have responded with bewilderment and concerned amusement. “I could never do that,” people often tell us, “but I wish I could.” One friend—a former chief of staff for a Republican member of Congress—tried to sign me up for a print subscription to Hustler magazine. (This unsolicited gesture of concern for my sexual well-being failed because of a new anti-porn law in his state. And thank heavens for that: We rent our home from a Bible scholar and minister.) Other friends, knowing that our landline doesn’t have caller ID, occasionally prank call us like we did when we were teenagers. (We welcome it; the calls lead to long, meaningful opportunities to catch up after years of texting.) When we aren’t home, callers seem amused to leave a real voice message on our answering machine. It’s fun to listen to younger people leave messages; they are adorably befuddled by what to say. When a friend in her 20s tried to call and got a busy signal, she figured the phone was broken: She’d never heard that sound before.

Of course, this has also come with trade-offs.

One night, while watching a DVD in our basement, Cristina and I saw a dark object flash across the screen. Did a bird get into the house? I stood up to turn on a light and saw another flying object with wide black wings silently swoop past my head.

“It’s a bat!” Cristina yelled. She leaped off the couch onto the ground and threw me a blanket. “Cover your head!”

As our eyes adjusted to the light, we watched several bats stream out of our fireplace, flying in circles around our heads. On our bellies, we crawled up the stairs and fled into our bedroom, shutting the door behind us. In normal times, we would have pulled out our phones and started frantically searching for what to do when your house is infested with bats. But we didn’t have that option. It was nearly midnight, too late to phone a friend, so we just had to pray that the bats hadn’t made it into our bedroom. We covered the baby’s crib with a mosquito net and tried to go to sleep.

The next morning, Cristina called her mother and asked her to search for information while I plunged into the phone book for the number of an exterminator. Over the phone, Cristina’s mother read us information about how to handle bats and whether we’d need a rabies shot. She described in detail how to identify bat poop. My mother-in-law was literally reading us the internet. It felt ridiculous.

Beyond battling bats in our basement, not having access to the internet also makes working from home a unique challenge. As a journalist, being virtually unreachable has done wonders for my ability to write for long stretches without distraction. But I have to leave the house in search of Wi-Fi to finish some tasks, such as responding to emails from editors, participating in group calls on Zoom, or performing other collaborative work that can only be done online. I spend hours during the workday holed up in my office or the local library, time that otherwise could be spent with a laptop on my couch. When coordinating work calls, I have to give out two phone numbers, depending on whether I’m home or not. I sometimes have to hop in the car before bed and drive down the mountain to check a last-minute email. My job as a university lecturer requires me to be present in the classroom, so I aim to accomplish as much work as possible on campus.

Separating spaces for online work and home life has helped me draw a sharp dividing line between my responsibilities to family and employer. The rise of telecommuting, supercharged by the pandemic, seems to have been a mixed bag, even for employees who enjoy it. Workers have more flexibility, but they are now expected to be reachable beyond work hours. Burnout persists. Working from home with children in the house has its own challenges.

Shopping requires careful planning. Without Amazon, we buy most of our goods in person at stores in town. We still order things online, but we can’t do it impulsively, and we buy fewer things as a result. While I was out shopping recently, I called Cristina at home to see if she needed anything at the store. “Just text me a list,” I said, completely forgetting that she quite literally could not. So we made our list the old-fashioned way. We talked about what we needed and I wrote it on a piece of paper.

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I acknowledge the immense privilege of being able to choose to opt out of a service that people rely on to get by in daily life. I also benefit from work that can be done partially on my own schedule and a job that provides parental leave, which was when we made this decision. But now that we have made this change in our lives, I will grieve if we ever have to return to the life we had before. Our tech-lite experiment will only become more difficult in the future, as more parts of our society require online connection to function. As our child grows, he will no doubt start to wonder why we don’t have the same access his friends have. What if he attends a school that requires online homework? Will we be those parents who resist? My own work in the future might not be possible offline.

Still, we’re not the only ones exploring ways to limit technology’s role in our lives. England recently advised schools to impose complete bans on cellphone use, a move that is slowly being adopted by some American school districts. A subset of Americans who want more control over their digital life are trading their smartphones for old-fashioned flip phones; Gen Z teenagers are leading the charge. It’s no mystery why vacationers are flocking to vacation rentals that offer “off-the-grid” properties without internet service as though it’s a special luxury.

Most people won’t—or can’t—go as far as we did. But they can set aside space in their lives uncluttered by devices, or their insatiable demand for our attention. Establishing a space beyond tech’s reach is a way of declaring independence from our unsettling reliance on technology. It reminds us that we can live and thrive without it—and happily so. Our family certainly has.

“I like you better without the internet,” Cristina told me recently.

So do I.

On December 1, 1900, at an intimate concert hall in Vienna, a respected local baritone gave the premiere of some early songs for voice and piano by Arnold Schoenberg. Today this music, though written in an elusive harmonic language, comes across as exuding hyper-Wagnerian richness and Brahmsian expressive depth. But the audience in Vienna broke into shouts, laughter, and jeers. From that day on, as Schoenberg ruefully recalled two decades later, “the scandal has never ceased.”

The author Harvey Sachs relates this story, and describes the songs sensitively, in his new book, Schoenberg: Why He Matters. As Sachs makes clear, the “scandal” only got worse. In 1908, Schoenberg premiered the Second String Quartet, his boldest step thus far toward breaking the tethers of tonality—the musical language of major and minor scales and keys that had been around for centuries. Plush with wayward harmonies and arching vocal lines, the music is dark, moody, and entrancing. But most of the audience heard only piercing dissonance and rambling stretches of ugly sounds. One reviewer deemed the piece not a composition but a “pathological case,” a “worthless assault” on the ears of listeners, for which the composer should be “declared a public nuisance.”

Sachs’s book, targeted to music-loving general readers, is less an impassioned defense of an indisputably influential composer than an earnest attempt by an engaging writer and insightful music historian to explain Schoenberg’s significant achievements and understand the lingering resistance to his works. These scores still “fascinate many people in the profession,” Sachs asserts, but “continue to meet with apathy, and often downright antipathy, on the part of most listeners.”

Sachs, the author of the critically acclaimed biography Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, admits to being an unlikely candidate to take on this task. He calls himself “Schoenberg-curious rather than a Schoenberg expert.” But this, he hoped, might make him more trustworthy to countless Schoenberg skeptics among classical-music devotees. If they find Schoenberg’s music baffling, off-putting, and excessively challenging, Sachs understands why and doesn’t really disagree.

But by maintaining that “most listeners” still cling to this perception of Schoenberg and those who followed in his path, Sachs winds up compounding the problem, at least to this admitted Schoenberg lover. The stigma is reinforced. Also, he only glances at a larger related issue that has consistently nagged at me.

The early 20th century was an era of fervent experimentation and radical ventures in all of the arts. Think of what emerged in other fields during the early 1920s when Schoenberg was writing his first 12-tone pieces. For a decade or more, cubist paintings such as Picasso’s 1921 Three Musicians had been literally shattering norms of representation by breaking up and reassembling shards of images into abstract configurations. James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, was banned in the United Kingdom for content deemed obscene when the real shocker was pages upon pages of seemingly stream-of-consciousness writing. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author opened in 1921 and overturned notions of what narrative drama could be. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at once rattled and riveted readers of poetry in 1922.

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A century later, one has to reserve a timed ticket to get into a Picasso exhibit at most museums, or a retrospective of Kandinsky. Culturally curious people, young and old, seem to accept that a “challenging” painting—or modern dance work, or play, or independent film—can be exciting, mind-expanding, really cool, and sort of out there precisely because it’s challenging. Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating?

Classical music was deemed, even by some musicians (though a minority, I’d argue), to have gone wrong in the middle decades of the 20th century. And Schoenberg is still seen as the main culprit.

Sachs genuinely comes across as trying to make a strong case for Schoenberg as a challenging, yes, but consequential composer. He does an admirable and efficient job telling the story of Schoenberg’s life, career, and struggles (the book is just more than 200 pages), and shows how early experiences fortified his later resolve to radically shake up contemporary music.

Born in 1874 in Vienna to a lower-middle-class Jewish family (his father kept a shoe shop), Schoenberg was drawn early to music. At around 16, he had to take a job as a bank clerk after his father died. But he made musical friends and became ever more focused and ambitious. His tenaciousness paid off. A composer who in his youth was compelled to teach himself compositional forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia’s instruction guide, he eventually wrote two books on harmony that are still in use and is considered among the century’s most significant teachers. At 23, in 1898, Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism, and his iconoclasm played out here as well. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he reconverted to Judaism at the most dangerous moment, becoming an outspoken advocate of Jewish solidarity and defiance. In 1933, he emigrated to America, where he wound up living in Los Angeles, across the street from Shirley Temple, and found a friend, and tennis partner, in George Gershwin.

Those early years in Vienna, when he faced disdain, left him both defensive and determined, and ready to try on the role of visionary prophet in contemporary music. Schoenberg “would see himself as a lonely David using his slingshot to fend off hordes of cultural Philistines who were incapable of grasping, or unwilling to grasp, the beauty and the importance of his ideas and his work,” Sachs writes.

That attitude emboldened Schoenberg as he confronted what he saw as the “crisis” of tonality that came to a head in the early 20th century. The musical system that listeners were comfortable with (think of Maria teaching the von Trapp children do, re, mi) was a kind of harmonic hierarchy in which melodic lines and chords could wander off and become ambiguous as long as the music never lost complete touch with the main key of any piece, or passage, of music. But the music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had grown so harmonically unmoored that Schoenberg felt, with some justification, that the functionality of major and minor keys had seriously dissipated.

He dared to cut the bonds, to write pieces that embraced this ambiguity and took it further, radically so. For some years, he wrote freely atonal pieces, in which extreme harmonic ambiguity became for him a new norm. Finally, he thought, if composers, he especially, were writing music that didn’t revolve around one key but gave equal weight to all 12 notes, why not systematize this?

He devised a system based on invented “tone rows,” as he called them, a series of all 12 notes put in an order without an established central key; the music would progress without any one note repeated until its turn came up again. This may seem a terribly cerebral conceit. (Sachs wisely doesn’t go into the details.) But two points are crucial. First, the technique actually allowed for all kinds of permutations, because the rows could be gone through forward or backwards, or inverted, or transcribed, and much more. Second, Schoenberg wanted audiences to forget about the methodology and just listen, even if the notes in a piano piece seemed all skittish and jumpy, if the sonorities sounded ungrounded, flinty and dissonant; listeners should give themselves over. Once he devised the technique, he felt liberated. In 1921, still swept up in a flush of nationalism he would later regret, Schoenberg boasted to a friend that he had discovered something that would assure “the dominance of German music for the next century.”

That’s where he was wrong. He had not discovered the next stage of music, because, it can be argued, there’s been no next stage. Music can change, even dramatically, without progressing to some higher, complex realm. And tonality was not in such a crisis after all, as Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Britten, Shostakovich, Copland, and a whole roster of composers would prove as the 20th century unfolded.

Rather, 12-tone music was an exhilarating leap into the beyond, an invitation to let go, to dispense, at least for a while, for the duration of a piece, with what Leonard Bernstein in his Norton Lectures at Harvard maintained was an inherent need in human beings from all cultures for music that loosely adheres to some kind of tonal harmonic mooring.

My strongest objection to Sachs’s account of what happened comes up for the first time in the book’s prologue, when he writes that Schoenberg’s 12-tone compositional technique and its offshoots, which were “virtually obligatory among composers struggling for recognition in the third quarter of the twentieth century,” have been “either abandoned or drastically altered, often beyond recognition” by most younger composers. He adds that atonality and the 12-tone technique “have proved to be dead ends for most listeners and for many—perhaps even most—professional performing musicians as well.”

This seems unfair and too sweeping. Did cubism prove a dead end because few painters today emulate Picasso’s specific approach and technique? For a couple of decades, abstract expressionism seemed to dominate and drive contemporary painting. Some influential critics maintained that this approach defined modern art. Similar claims were made by influential, if regrettably dogmatic, 12-tone composers in the 1960s and ’70s who held teaching posts at universities. They dominated the intellectual high ground over their timid colleagues who, as they saw it, still hewed to various kinds of tonality.

All such pronouncements were wrong. Abstract expressionism remains an exhilarating development that still influences painters whose works look little like those of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock. And the impact of the bold experiments pioneered by Schoenberg is ever present.

Go to a contemporary music concert at any conservatory or university. It’s safe to say that none of the young composers on the programs are writing anything close to strict 12-tone works. Still, in almost every piece, you hear intrepid elements of atonality, pointillist riffs, the tart harmonic twang and flighty figurations characteristic of Schoenberg & Co., even when the overall musical language may be drawing from many styles—tonality in the manner of Copland or Britten, minimalism, folk music, jazz, electronica, whatever. And film scores for decades have been thick with stretches of gnarly, 12-tonish sounds to convey mystery, angst, and intensity. Looked at this way, Schoenberg’s atonal and 12-tone works, far from being dead ends, were door openers.

Even in his own time, as Sachs shows, Schoenberg was not as dismissed as is generally assumed. He did have powerful champions and his share of gratifying successes. In a compelling chapter, Sachs discusses the ecstatically received 1912 Berlin premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, a piece that boldly blends modernist atonal music with Berlin cabaret. Written for an actress and a small instrumental ensemble, the piece sets 21 poems by Albert Giraud (translated into German) relating the exploits of the timeless Pierrot character, who appears in a moon-drunk state, singing of lust, violence, nightmares, and heresy. The voice part, tailored to the actress’s talent, is written in a kind of song-speech that Schoenberg called “Sprechstimme.” The music “‘fulfills’ the words and adds dimensions to them,” Sachs writes, “to such a degree that one feels as if the words have grown out of the music itself, in a sort of onomatopoeic symbiosis, which of course is not the case.”  

Sachs explains the dearth of prominent orchestras’ performances of major Schoenberg works by pointing to the inherent complexities and awkward technical difficulties of the scores. Sachs writes admiringly of the brilliant violinist Hilary Hahn’s recording of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, but points out, quoting Hahn, that she needed a couple of years to train her hands to play it and to uncover the music’s “grace, wit, lyricism, romanticism and drama.”

But I could imagine many superb violinists devoting two years to mastering the concertos by Tchaikovsky or Brahms, among the most difficult in the canon. In 1970, on Beethoven’s 200th birthday, I heard Rudolf Serkin play a monumental performance of Beethoven’s daunting Hammerklavier sonata at Carnegie Hall. Some weeks later, I was able to congratulate him in person for that unforgettable Hammerklavier. He looked at me and said, “It took me 50 years.”

Also, assessing the significance of a composer’s works by the current popularity of his pieces is not quite right. The stigmatization of Schoenberg has stuck, unfortunately. Yet I find that with just a little help, open-minded listeners respond. In classes I’ve taught, I’ve won over the Schoenberg-averse by playing a Bach musette and then the musette from Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op. 25, which is almost like a 12-tone transformation of a Bach suite. Except for the way the pitches were picked, the Bach and the Schoenberg are strikingly similar, the same short-short-long dance rhythm, the same skipping, impish character.

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The argument that classical music has never recovered from the wrong turn taken in the middle decades of the 20th century seems dated and downright wrong. Judging by the reactions of audiences I’ve been part of over the past 20 years, even just in New York, the climate for contemporary music has gotten more and more welcoming. It seemed an apt reading of the cultural moment when in 2020 the New York Philharmonic largely eschewed commemorating the 250th birthday of Beethoven and instead inaugurated Project 19, a series of works commissioned from 19 women composers to commemorate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. The Metropolitan Opera has given New York premieres in recent seasons of unapologetically challenging—yes, that word—but arresting operas, including Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin and Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel. This season, in an inventively contemporary and vibrantly choreographed production, the Met is presenting its house premiere of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a long-overdue hearing of a breakthrough work from this Pulitzer Prize–winning composer. Davis has written that he attempted to blend “the improvised and subversive spirit of the blues” with the form and structure of “the post-tonal harmonic language of Berg and Stravinsky.”

Despite what you may hear, many works by Schoenberg and his circle, especially his devoted student Alban Berg, written during those tumultuous decades of change, have been embraced by audiences. In the fall of 2021, when an ailing Michael Tilson Thomas heroically conducted a program with the New York Philharmonic ending with Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, the high point, for me and for many, was a magnificent performance of Berg’s 1935 Violin Concerto, with Gil Shaham as a soloist. This wrenching, sublime piece folds passages of tonal music, including strands of a plaintive Bach chorale, into the complex musical language that Schoenberg pioneered.

The performance received a long, ardent ovation from an audience of attentive listeners who didn’t seem to know that they were supposed to find 12-tone music alienating.

Today’s Big Five digital platforms aren’t the first tech giants to bristle at government scrutiny. Long before Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft began spending millions of dollars to fight antitrust rules and other measures that would challenge their business models, 20th-century behemoths such as AT&T and IBM were insisting that government interventions in their business would stifle innovation. In reality, one of the most important things the United States government has ever done to advance technology is regulate it. Microsoft was the beneficiary of antitrust litigation aimed at IBM, once the country’s dominant computer maker; Amazon, Google, and Facebook have flourished because a 1996 law granted them extraordinary protection from legal liability for the content they circulate; Apple is a beneficiary of a strong patent regime.

The advent of smartphones, one-click shopping, and an avalanche of digital stimuli doesn’t change the fact that, when any industry stands astride the economy and reaches into most Americans’ homes, lawmakers should assess whether the public interest is being protected. But the reality that the tech giants have long been entwined with government policy somehow got lost in the age of “Move fast and break things”—a mantra that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg coined more than a decade ago—and public officials are only now returning to the question of how best to regulate the biggest platforms.

[Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein: Democracy is losing its race with disruption]

As tech platforms have come under growing scrutiny in recent years for their alleged antitrust violations, their data surveillance, and even their potential role in the deteriorating mental health of teenage girls, the Big Five have achieved the remarkable feat of antagonizing influential lawmakers in both major political parties. Senators Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren make unlikely allies. Yet the Republican from South Carolina and the Democrat from Massachusetts stand together in criticizing the tech giants’ high-handedness and lack of accountability. “Nobody elected Big Tech executives to govern anything,” they declared in a July New York Times essay.

Graham and Warren follow the example of the lawmakers who, in 1887, established the Interstate Commerce Commission to prevent the railroads from defying the public interest. The two senators propose the establishment of a new regulatory agency—the Digital Consumer Protection Commission—to forestall online harms, protect free speech, foster competition, safeguard privacy, and protect national security.

In 2019, the policy insiders Karen Kornbluh and Ellen P. Goodman recommended the establishment of a Digital Democracy Agency to combat disinformation and support local journalism. In 2020, the former Federal Communications Commission chief Tom Wheeler, the former FCC senior counsel Philip Verveer, and the consumer-protection advocate Gene Kimmelman called for an expert-led Code Council that would establish digital norms akin to building and fire codes and work in conjunction with a legislatively mandated Digital Platform Agency, which would be “oriented towards risk management rather than micromanagement.” These proposals differ in their particulars—Wheeler, Verveer, and Kimmelman imply that their plan would allow regulators in the quickly evolving digital world to move faster and with greater sophistication than the lumbering FCC—but all of them envision oversight of digital platforms by institutions created via the democratic process and accountable to the public.

[Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West: The AI debate is happening in a cocoon]

The American tech industry has never been an entrepreneurial free-for-all. Much of the country’s information infrastructure was built atop a telephone system that depended on local, state, and federal regulation. When the first local telephone-operating company opened in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878, it had a municipal franchise—a type of agreement that helped promote the build-out of lines and became a cornerstone in the regulatory framework of the Bell System, which was the dominant network provider from the 1900s until its court-ordered dismantling in 1984. Municipal-franchise law powerfully shaped the business strategy of telephone-network providers from day one—including the rates they charged, the markets they served, and even the equipment they used. Not the absence of regulation, but its pervasiveness, made the mid-20th-century U.S. telephone network the envy of the world.

For decades, though, Bell’s formidable public-relations machinery touted the phone company’s technical virtuosity and economic sophistication while downplaying the regulatory environment that structured the Bell System. Not until after the system’s dismantling would the full significance of Bell’s PR wizardry come to light, a topic that I explore in more detail in my 2010 book, Network Nation.

Government intervention has also shaped other essential communications networks dominated by private companies. U.S.-style broadcast regulation originated during World War I with the Navy’s commandeering of the formidable wireless-telegraph patent portfolio that the Italian inventor and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi had assembled. Today’s digital platforms did not spring fully formed from the brow of some geeky teenager holed away in his parents’ garage. Rather, they are a second-order overlay on a massive, decades-long Cold War government project to build an information infrastructure robust enough to enable the United States to prevail against the Soviet Union in a nuclear war. The vigorous regulation of Big Tech through antitrust prosecutions has almost always promoted the common good—indeed, the government breakup of the Bell System opened the way for our current digital platforms.

Today’s tech giants, like their 20th-century counterparts, seek to avoid outside scrutiny of their internal operations. Regulatory oversight generates useful information that companies can’t control. The commercialization of the transistor speaks to the benefits of transparency. Although the FCC mostly left the regulation of the Bell System to the states, it would, in the 1930s, authorize a large, unprecedented, and unusually well-funded investigation of the telephone industry that showed how the company was using its market power to block rival network providers and thwart outside equipment manufacturers. Following World War II, this knowledge jump-started an antitrust suit that opened up Bell’s jealously guarded patent vaults, forcing the company to license the transistor (Bell’s most valuable patent). That in turn fueled the rise of consumer electronics and computing, as well as the digitization of many sectors of the global economy. As the business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. contended in 2001, the “gods” who ushered in the “electronic century” were neither entrepreneurs nor elected officials; they were the unsung “middle-level bureaucrats” in the Justice Department’s antitrust division who forced tech giants such as Bell, RCA, and IBM to release vital inventions that they had tried to lock down.

The regulatory triumphs of an earlier era should provide clear inspiration to today’s lawmakers, many of whom have expressed frustration with the tech giants but struggled to articulate a rationale for their regulation. Goals could include demanding transparency about  how the major platforms operate, promoting competition by keeping the biggest platforms from buying up their potential rivals, and holding the platforms accountable for harms they caused—including data breaches and the sale of stolen goods.

The regulation of tech giants need not end at America’s shorelines. Amazon ships worldwide; Apple manufactures millions of iPhones in China; Google’s search algorithm crunches data wherever they can be found; Facebook boasts that, on any given day, 90 percent of its users are outside the United States; Microsoft leases its software to clients in dozens of countries.

[Evelyn Douek: The cold dose of reality awaiting Elon Musk]

Because digital platforms today are global in reach, some aspects of their regulation should be as well. In a variety of areas, the United States has accepted the benefits of international governance. As far back as the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln supported the convening in Paris of the world’s first international postal conference. Following a brief hiatus, this U.S.-backed project would culminate in the establishment of one of the first international standard-setting bodies—which, in 1878, would proclaim itself the Universal Postal Union. Today, decisions by authorities in some big markets radiate outward to other markets. European Union rules requiring smartphone makers to use USB-C chargers nudged Apple to adopt that standard—rather than keep using an old proprietary plug—for the newest iPhones now being sold in the United States. American regulators may not agree on all matters with their counterparts in other major markets, but international standards can help guarantee that the tech giants abide by the global public’s desires, rather than the other way around.

Claims that government regulation of the tech giants will stifle innovation are simply wrong. As the historical record makes clear, past regulatory initiatives in the United States have promoted fair trade; fostered worthwhile innovation; checked irresponsible, dangerous, and illegal business behavior; and protected not only consumers but also the country from a multitude of harms.

The actress finds it hard to reconcile her "fairy tale story" with the tough reality for most Latinos.