Richie Bell stood at the door of an East Village bar, nervous for a singular reason: he had to hand over his phone to a bouncer to get in. At 23 years old, Bell had hardly ever been without a device — he got his first iPhone in elementary school — but when he saw a video on TikTok advertising a queer, phone-free, funk dance party called Who’s Dancing?, he decided to test his limits. He immediately purchased a ticket and planned to attend alone.
Bell was pleasantly surprised to discover he wouldn’t have to relinquish his phone at all, but simply allow security to place tape on both the back and front-facing cameras. “You can’t scroll Reels because, think about it, on iPhones anyway, if they’re taping the front camera, that’s also the speaker area,” Bell told Vox. Without the temptation of content on his phone, Bell mingled with other attendees, who were similarly unoccupied and also flying solo. Even though event staff kept their eyes peeled for any errant phone usage, no one seemed to reach for them anyway.
Compared to other bars and parties he’s been to, Bell found this one more conducive to unbridled socializing and dancing. It’s easier to approach a stranger when they’re not hunched over their phone. No one is worried about looking like a fool, immortalized in video, because everyone is a little foolish, moving their bodies without fear of judgment.
Across the country, clubs, bars, music venues, and other social spaces are encouraging attendees to lock their phones away — or, at least keep them out of sight — for screen-free gatherings. According to event hosting platform Eventbrite, phone-free experiences have increased more than 500 percent globally between 2024 and 2025. Musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Harry Styles banned phones at their concerts; comedians John Mulaney and Bill Burr have followed suit. Clubs from Los Angeles to Miami are creating camera-free dance floors. Bars and restaurants in cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that have long prohibited phone and camera use have been joined by newer establishments in Charlotte, North Carolina and Fort Worth, Texas.
The rise of phone-free socializing speaks to a growing exhaustion with an always-connected world. More than half of US adults say they use their smartphone too much, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. Excessive smartphone use has been linked to poor sleep quality and depression, and even the mere presence of a phone lessens cognitive capacity. The ubiquity of devices — and the cameras on them — has instilled a low-grade panic that you might end up going viral for eating a sandwich in the background of an influencer’s video. Even Gen Z, who has always lived under the spectre of technology, is nostalgic for times before everyone was “plugged in” and widely accessible.
Screen-free events are the natural evolution of the cultural desire to break up with tech. By transforming physical spaces, ridding them of distracting devices, event organizers and bar owners aim to foster connection, reclaim attention, and maintain a sense of privacy. Even a short detox from smartphones has the ability to dramatically shape the tenor of a get-together for the better.
Before X&ND (pronounced “zand”), the funk and soul artist who organized the phone-free party Bell attended, first conceived of Who’s Dancing?, they noticed very few people actually cutting loose at clubs. Instead, they were on their phones. “The second that anybody starts dancing in a club where there’s meant to be dancing, people pull out their phone,” X&ND told Vox. “They’re getting surveilled, they’re getting essentially exploited for content and being put in a position where they’re on display for people that they didn’t necessarily want to be on display for.” X&ND wanted to create a space for women, queer, and trans people to dance and express themselves without the fear of ending up on the internet.
Since last summer, X&ND has hosted eight sold-out dance parties (and Bell estimates he’s attended seven). Phone-free events, X&ND said, are a reclamation of culture, of attention, of self-expression. “Influencers aren’t able to post anything. Different companies aren’t posting anything about our parties because we don’t give them the material to,” they said. “I think it’s the culture taking the culture back.”
The bar and nightclub scene has struggled in recent years, with many venues closing due to high rent and fewer patrons spending money on alcohol. But perhaps a less obvious culprit is the pervasive anxiety of being captured on video during a moment of vulnerability. Some might be turned off from entering these spaces altogether due to the high risk of embarrassment if they’re captured and mocked online.
In Washington, DC, 28-year-old Jo Vee had similar concerns about privacy and craved an environment where they could be anonymous. Like Bell, Vee has had access to a camera phone since they were a child and can’t remember a time when they weren’t thinking about what to post on Instagram. But when a friend organized a phone-free dance party, Vee jumped at the opportunity to enjoy themselves, free from the pressures of the algorithm — and the potential of accidentally becoming a meme. “There’s nothing more terrifying than thinking that you’re going to a party just to have fun, and then you wake up the next morning and there’s a video of you that has 10 million views that you had no idea about, and now you’re like a GIF reaction on the internet.” (Vee clarified that they do not speak from personal experience, but said that a version of this has happened to a couple of friends.)
Although many people inherently recognize the downsides of excessive phone use, they also realize they’re fighting an uphill battle. Demanding jobs can tether workers to their emails and algorithms are designed to keep us engaged and scrolling. Our attention is constantly being pulled from the real world to the digital one. But even a brief respite from screens can be beneficial.
In his research, Georgetown associate professor Kostadin Kushlev found that phone usage during a social interaction undermines how much people enjoy spending time with others. “It’s not so much [that] the phone is making us feel unhappy,” Kushlev told Vox, “it’s more like I could be happier if I was not using a phone.” Put another way, people enjoy social gatherings more when they keep their phone out of sight because they can give their full attention to their conversation partner.
Kushlev’s other research has shown that as people curbed their phone usage over a two-week period, their ability to pay attention improved. Even a shorter detox period, like a two-hour phone-free gathering, could minimize overstimulation and encourage greater focus, Kushlev said.
Inside the Charlotte, North Carolina, bar Antagonist, couples on dates engage in heart-to-hearts and neighboring tables of strangers strike up conversations. That’s because the bar has banned phones. Upon entering, visitors are asked to secure their phone in a pouch which they keep with them for the duration of their stay. If they need to use their phone, they can do so outside.
Since Antagonist opened in March, owner Michael Salzarulo has observed patrons clamoring for a Friday night detox after a long week of screen-mediated work. “Normally Saturday is your biggest day,” Salzarulo said, “but Friday nights are our busiest nights of the week.” While anyone can lock their phone in another room for a few hours, Antagonist provides an element of accountability, Salzarulo said: a dedicated space for distraction-free connection.
Alex Becker was yearning for a break from her phone and her “email, Microsoft Excel job” when she co-founded PA Unplugged, a nonprofit championing policies that advocate for more mindful uses of technology, last year. One of the nonprofit’s initiatives, Screen Free Philly, maintains a calendar of screen-free events and organizes its own gatherings at breweries, parks, and other civic institutions, urging attendees to set aside their phones for discussions, art projects, and board games. At the most recent get-together, dozens of attendees handed their phones to Becker while they completed a series of puzzles throughout the city.
Although these gatherings are still fairly niche, Becker sensed a hunger among participants to seek out further opportunities for tech-free connection. While ditching a smartphone completely may be unrealistic, setting it aside for date night or an afternoon of gaming might be a salve for our tech-addled brains. We can implement these best practices at our own gatherings, too, by encouraging friends to leave their phones in a basket by the door or offering disposable cameras at parties.
“People are just done and ready to take their attention back, take their time back, and encourage more real-world connection,” Becker said.
Editor’s note, August 23, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in February.
This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.
I’m a woman in my 30s and I think I want to have a child, but I have a health condition that makes it harder (not impossible) to get pregnant than for most women. It would also make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people. It wouldn’t be permanently disabling, but the physical effects would be bad enough that I really don’t want to be pregnant.
I’m fortunate enough that I can probably afford to get a surrogate through a reputable agency. But surrogacy is frowned upon and often considered unethical. Long ago, I knew someone who said she loved the idea of being pregnant and providing gestation as a service to other people, so maybe in theory, it is possible for someone to freely choose to be a surrogate without being coerced by financial need? But even if it could be done ethically, there’s such a stigma around it and I fear being judged by friends and family. There seems to be a sense that there’s something wrong, unnatural, selfish, or unwomanly in wanting to have a biological child but not wanting your own body to be the vessel for it.
Plus, it’s not like I’m the only person in the world for whom pregnancy would suck. I think my experience probably would be worse than average, but pregnancy is just an unpleasant thing overall so I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body. I’d love your help with this.
Dear Really Don’t Want To Be Pregnant,
There are some ethical questions about surrogacy that it’s genuinely worth asking, and some that I don’t want you to devote another second to — so let’s start there.
As you said, there’s a cultural stigma around not wanting to turn your body into a vessel for childbearing — it’s deemed “wrong” or “unwomanly.” But that idea is pure garbage. The idea that there’s some “proper” way to be a woman is a patriarchal construct; anyone who tells you you’re “unwomanly” for not wanting to gestate is reflecting sexist expectations that women’s bodies should be available for reproductive labor.
So to the extent that your fear of being judged is about that, please don’t give it another thought. But of course, there are real moral questions that surrogacy brings up.
I’ll tell you right off the bat that I do think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable in some situations. First, it helps that surrogacy is not one monolithic thing. There’s a big distinction between commercial surrogacy (where you pay someone to carry a baby) and altruistic surrogacy (the unpaid version, where the surrogate carries the baby as a literal labor of love). It’s not easy to find an altruistic surrogate — after all, pregnancy is dangerous business — but I agree with your intuition that if you’re lucky enough to know someone willing to volunteer for the role, opting for that is a good way to avoid most concerns about commodification or exploitation.
Within commercial surrogacy, a second distinction has to do with where the surrogate lives. There’s a moral difference between hiring a surrogate in a developing country and hiring one in, say, the US. In countries like Georgia, for example, surrogacy agencies have been known to recruit at domestic violence shelters — some women see surrogacy as the only way to win financial freedom from an abusive spouse. Ukraine, Cyprus, and several others are also known to have ethically problematic surrogacy industries.
But American surrogates are typically not low-income; they’re usually middle-class white women with husbands and kids of their own, and they have other economic opportunities available to them. The better surrogacy agencies screen out poor women, who are at risk of coercion. That empirical context means there’s less (though not zero) potential for exploitation in the US, compared with international surrogacy.
Another reason I think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable is that for many, many people, the urge to have kids — including ones who are biologically related to them — feels like a need and not just a want.
Many opponents of surrogacy argue that nobody has a “right” to a biological child, so if you can’t or don’t want to be pregnant, too bad. And those opponents are right that nobody has an absolute right to have a baby — otherwise, the state would be obligated to ensure surrogates, egg donors, and sperm donors were made available regardless of their own willingness to participate! But people may still have a qualified right — the kind of right that we generally honor but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others.
When it comes to people who are physically unable to create a biological child — when they have what doctors call a “medical indication” — I think the qualified right to have a kid means that surrogacy can be ethical, provided it meets certain criteria like informed consent.
But your situation is trickier because it’s not impossible for you to get pregnant — it’s more that, for certain reasons, you don’t want to. Typically, your case would be referred to as “elective surrogacy.” Some professionals will refuse to arrange surrogacy if they deem it elective rather than medically indicated.
And yet, doctors are increasingly recognizing that the line between “medically indicated” and “elective” is not so tidy.
While elective surrogacy is often associated with vanity — it brings to mind a celebrity who doesn’t want to be pregnant because she doesn’t want to “mess up” her figure — it’s not like everyone in the elective camp is there for cosmetic reasons.
What about someone who could get pregnant but is deathly afraid of giving birth because she had a traumatic experience — like, say, her best friend dying in childbirth? Or what about someone who’s trans and who physically could carry a pregnancy, but who knows it would cause such gender dysphoria that there’s a risk of serious psychological harm? Shouldn’t a mental health need be considered a type of medical need?
These are not hypothetical experiences — real people have testified to them — but they often haven’t been taken seriously as medical needs. I suspect that these people have endured what the contemporary philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice.”
Epistemic injustice refers to “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” When society denies someone the credibility to assess their own life experience, or discounts an important part of that experience because of a gap in our collective interpretive resources, that can be an example of epistemic injustice. I think people who fall in between medical categories are too often at risk of being wronged in this way, and I don’t want to see that happen to you.
So I want to acknowledge that I don’t know what health condition you’re referring to when you say you have a condition that would “make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people.” Since I don’t know the details, I’d encourage you to ask yourself: How much more uncomfortable? How much more disfiguring? And how heavy and lasting a toll would that discomfort or disfigurement take on your overall well-being?
Only you can really try to answer that last question, because the same effects can land differently for different people, depending on how well-resourced we are financially, socially, psychologically, and even spiritually.
Once you’ve thought about how big and enduring the risk of harm is to you, try asking yourself this: Is the risk to you so much greater than the risk to a woman of average health that you feel comfortable transferring the risk of pregnancy and childbirth onto her?
Some people will tell you that question is irrelevant. They will say that the only value that matters here is autonomy — yours and the potential surrogate’s — and if you and she both consent to a surrogacy contract, and she is not coerced into it by financial desperation, then that’s that!
But there may be another important value at stake here: justice.
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As far as I can tell, your case is in a gray area — surrogacy is neither obviously “medically indicated” nor obviously “elective” based on the information you shared. If you ask yourself, “Do I think there’s a significant risk that carrying a child would significantly harm me?” and you answer “Yes!” — then some doctors would say surrogacy is medically indicated. But if the answer you feel bubbling up is, “Well…no, not really,” then you may be closer to the “elective” side of the spectrum. And then I think it becomes reasonable to inquire whether it feels fair to ask another woman to take on the considerable risks of pregnancy and childbirth.
You wrote of pregnancy, “I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body.” That suggests that you currently see yourself as more in the elective camp. I urge you to give yourself the space to really interrogate that with an equal measure of honesty and self-compassion. If honesty compels you to say you don’t feel justified in putting someone else’s body in harm’s way in a situation where she otherwise wouldn’t be, then maybe you’ve got your answer.
But if you’re discounting the risk of psychological harm to yourself because you don’t think that “counts” as real need, please know that mental health is just as medically legitimate as physical health. And if you talk to a medical professional about the option of surrogacy, please talk to more than one so you’re less at risk of getting boxed into a category that doesn’t capture you right.
At the end of the day, perhaps none of us can be a perfect interpreter even of ourselves. But you get to be the interpreter-in-chief — with both the power and responsibility that implies.
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.
A few things are certain in life: death, taxes, LeBron James playing professional basketball — and Americans’ belief that crime is getting worse. Since Gallup began asking about national crime in 1989, a majority of respondents said they thought crime in the US was higher than the year before in every survey year except 2000, 2001, and 2025. Even in that last year, 49 percent still said more crime was happening. It’s perhaps the archetypal example of negativity bias, the mental habit of giving more weight to bad news than good.
Last week, the FBI put some numbers on just how big that bias is. The American murder rate — which peaked in 1980 at 10.2 per 100,000 — fell to an estimated 4.1 per 100,000 people in 2025, matching the rates recorded in 1955 and 1956 for the lowest ever measured in the country. The violent crime rate (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) fell 9.7 percent, the largest single drop since J. Edgar Hoover was running the bureau in 1936.
That much is known. But what’s not known for sure about the crime drop is almost everything else. Adam Gelb, who runs the Council on Criminal Justice, says that there is no single or easy explanation for the historic lows, while Jeff Asher, the analyst who spotted this decline before nearly everyone else, agrees. For every leading candidate — federal pandemic spending, some normalization after the 2020 social collapse, better violence prevention, even the decline of drinking — there is a corresponding hole.
But there is one American city where researchers can point to a specific program, measure what it did, and put real numbers on it. And it just happens to be the city that spent 50 years — and five award-winning seasons on HBO — as America’s shorthand for murder.
Baltimore recorded more than 300 homicides a year for most of the last decade, and more than 200 for most of the past half-century. In one month, July 2015, 45 people were killed — an astounding figure for a city of just around 600,000 people at the time.
But Baltimore finished 2025 with 133 homicides, the fewest since 1977 and about 60 percent fewer than in 2020. Through the first eight months of this year, the city has seen 60 murders, and the police commissioner’s target is to stay under 100.
What caused this? Three things at once.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy identifies the few people most likely to shoot or be shot — two groups that heavily overlap — and sends people to their doors with two messages: you are on our radar, and here is housing and job training. Separately, the longer-running Safe Streets program puts outreach workers with real street credibility between disputes, aiming to interrupt them before they become shootings.
That’s the harm reduction element. There’s also a tough-on-crime component. The state’s attorney office says it has secured 2,129 convictions since 2023 across several gun-related violent-crime categories, with over 1,700 of those defendants incarcerated.
Meanwhile, Baltimore’s homicide clearance rate reached 60 percent by mid-2026. Its nonfatal-shooting clearance rate was 54 percent, up more than 12 percentage points from a year earlier. Criminologists have long held that the certainty of being caught deters criminals more than the severity of the sentence, and more successful shooting investigations are a common thread where violence is falling around the country.
How do you tell whether a program worked, or whether a city just got lucky? Drug trials get a control group; cities don’t. Baltimore got one almost by accident: the strategy launched in the city’s Western District in 2022 and nowhere else, which left the rest of the city as a comparison.
That’s what a team of economists and criminologists used. They measured the Western District against Baltimore neighborhoods that hadn’t started the program yet, and over 18 months the number of people shot there, fatally or not, ran about 30 percent below that stand-in. Killings alone fell by a similar share, but deaths are rare enough that chance couldn’t be ruled out. Police made no more arrests than before. Arrests for serious violent crime rose 81 percent.
A second, looser test set the whole city against a composite of other big American cities and put Baltimore’s murder rate about 25 percent below it. The authors are careful with that one: too much changed in Baltimore at once to say how much it the strategy was responsible for.
Baltimore’s success is built on two ideas, and they came from two very different places.
The first came from a doctor named Gary Slutkin, who spent the 1980s and early 1990s fighting tuberculosis in San Francisco, cholera in Somali refugee camps, and AIDS across Africa. He came home to Chicago in 1995, a year the city recorded over 800 homicides.
When Slutkin examined the city’s shooting maps, they looked familiar. Clustered in space, clustered in time, and spreading case to case — murder resembled the outbreaks he used to fight. Slutkin reasoned that the way to treat violence was to treat it like cholera: find the people most likely to transmit. Interrupt the transmission. Change the conditions that let it spread. Slutkin built the model into a program called CeaseFire, now Cure Violence Global, and its Baltimore descendant is Safe Streets.
The second idea came from a criminologist. David Kennedy, working in Boston in the 1990s, found that 61 gangs with about 1,300 members — under 1 percent of the city’s young people — were tied to at least 60 percent of its youth homicides. Get those people in a room with police, prosecutors, and community elders, tell them plainly what comes next, and the shooting slows down.
That approach is called focused deterrence. Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy is a version of it. To see how it works over a longer period of time, take a trip across the Atlantic to Glasgow in Scotland, which in the early 2000s was considered the murder capital of Europe.
In 2005, in the midst of that wave of violence, Glasgow’s Strathclyde Police established a Violence Reduction Unit that operated with a basic thesis: evidence shows that violence can be prevented. Among other interventions, the unit sent trauma surgeons into schools to describe what a blade does to a face and stationed outreach workers at hospital bedsides to reach victims in the vital hours after an attack, the moment when retaliation can still be stopped.
In 2024-25, Scotland recorded 45 homicide victims, the fewest since comparable records began in 1976 and down from 96 two decades earlier. Every case was solved.
So we have clues to why crime has dropped so much, but not clear conclusions. As successful as Baltimore’s group violence strategy has proved, a 2023 study of a similar street-outreach effort in Boston found no effect whatsoever. And the latest evaluation of Baltimore’s own Safe Streets — 11 sites, each measured against a stand-in version of the same neighborhood without the program — produced numbers that sound terrific but settle very little: youth homicides down 42 percent and youth shootings down 21 percent, but neither is strong enough to rule out chance. And while some sites saw youth homicide fall by as much as 100 percent, two sites saw it rise by 42 and 89 percent.
Some experts, like the UC Irvine criminologist Emily Owens, argue the crime decline has been so widespread and similar — big cities and small, red and blue governments — that the true cause is some larger social change rather than what any one city is doing. Nor can we be sure the fall will continue. Billions in federal pandemic relief money has supported many of the programs that have worked well in places like Baltimore, and that money is already running out. But we can identify one reason why it happened, and learn from that success.
As it happens, Gary Slutkin was not the first doctor to look at a map of the dead and see a pattern in it. In September 1854, a cholera outbreak was killing hundreds of people in London’s Soho district. A doctor named John Snow had mapped the outbreak and saw the dead were clustered disproportionately close to the district’s Broad Street water pump. Snow had a theory that water was connected to the disease and convinced a Soho parish board to remove the handle of the pump.
Nobody in Soho at that moment could have told you what caused cholera. It would only be 29 years later that someone would definitely identify the responsible pathogen, and in doing so, explain why Snow’s intervention worked. But the explanation could wait. The dying stopped that month in Soho, just as it is stopping in Baltimore and around the US today. And that’s what counts.
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