If you live in any kind of major city, small city, suburb, or area that could in any way qualify as “urban,” you’ve been hearing them.

Booms. Loud, repetitive booms. Bone-ratting explosions, nerve-shredding pops that maybe could be gunshots and maybe aren’t. They start as soon as the sun goes down, and they stop hours later. They can turn any street into the Green Zone in 2004.

They’re fireworks. And since mid-May, they’ve been going off all over the country, in almost every neighborhood, almost every night. The uptick in fireworks happens pretty much every summer, since Americans love blowing stuff up to celebrate freedom. Even in past years, Americans have shot off hundreds of millions of pounds of fireworks to celebrate the holiday.

But it really, truly has been much louder and more intense this year with high-grade pyro that’s usually only seen at county fairs or baseball games getting launched in the middle of big residential clusters – sparking online complaining and endless calls to the police. Unlike so much of what I write about, this is not a conspiracy – it’s a thing that’s happening. Or as Slate put it on June 10, “Yes, You’re Hearing Way More Fireworks Than Usual.”

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