I don't want to die wearing AirPods

My earthquake epiphany.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

This was written post-earthquake but pre-solar eclipse, so if something equally remarkable happens with that, feel free to apply this *gestures vaguely* to that *gestures vaguely*. —Kate

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At 10:23 am on Friday morning I left for a run. Just .4 miles in, however, my running app shows that I came to a dead stop. As I was reaching the end of a residential side street, neighbors started emerging from their homes, exclaiming to one another across stoops. The only person who looked as confused as me was a woman walking her dog. Both of us took out our AirPods to hear what was going on. 

New York City had just experienced a 4.8 magnitude earthquake, an event whose rarity is the main reason most New Yorkers haven’t up and moved to Los Angeles already. My group chat was abuzz, Twitter even more so, but I hadn’t felt a thing. 

“I didn’t feel it either!” the woman with her dog told me. Then we both looked down at the AirPods in our hands. They were the noise-canceling kind, good for blocking out comments from strangers on the streets and, it turns out, the shifting of tectonic plates.