There's a new ringtone in town, and the older you are, the less likely you are to hear it. Agence France Presse reports that a ringtone known as "Teen Buzz," originally developed by a British security firm to discourage loitering by youths has "invaded U.S. classrooms." At a frequency of 17 Khz, the tone apparently "falls within the highest of pitches noticeable to humans." But as we age, we lose the ability to hear high-pitched tones. Students can thus delight themselves by text-messaging each other without arousing their aging teacher's suspicions. Of course, the downward glances and furious thumb-typing might still give them away.

New Yorker writer Louis Menand, inspired to a comical rant, writes that the main news of the story "is not that students are fooling their teachers, which was never news, even in ancient Greece, or that technology is rapidly unraveling the fabric of trust and respect on which civil society depends, which everyone already knows. It is that one more way for middle-aged people to feel that they're losing it has been discovered."