We’ve all been there. It’s 2 a.m. and you hear an eardrum-piercing beep. Your first reaction is to cover your head with a pillow and pretend it never happened. Eventually the slow chirping takes ...

Dr. Elizabeth Yuko is a bioethicist and adjunct professor of ethics at Fordham University. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, CNN & Playboy.

Always assume a sounding smoke alarm means there’s a fire and you should get to safety as quickly as possible. But what do you do when it’s a false alarm that doesn’t stop? A scenario like that can be ...