Via Rebecca’s Pocket, still my favourite blog on the net, an article about hearing loss and young children from the NY Times.

It’s become fashionable to denigrate health & safety & ‘political correctness’, and to say ‘in my day, we jumped out of trees and played in the road and it never did me any harm’, but the prevalence of excessive noise in everyday life is new. My worst annoyance? Dance teachers who pump up the volume and then scream over it. Sorry if I offend anyone with that statement, but it’s true: we have to take the risk of over-exposure to noise seriously.