Michael Owen

“Let’s travel now to moonlit valleys blanketed with heather,” Harry Styles says to me. The pop star’s voice—just shy of songful, velvet-dry—makes it seem as if we’re at a sleepaway camp for lonely grown-ups, where he is my fetching counselor, and now it’s time for lights out.Styles’s iambic beckoning lies within a “sleep story” in the mindfulness app Calm.

​​At eight o’clock one Saturday morning, six giants appeared in front of the building where I live, propped open the front door, and started heaving a thickly swaddled 1930 Steinway Model L grand piano up the narrow switchbacks to the fourth floor.If these stairs give out, I thought—not a distant possibility—I’ll have blood on my hands.