I will introduce an isoperimetric inequality for the Hamming cube and some of its applications. The applications include a “stability” version of Harper’s edge-isoperimetric inequality, which was first proved by Friedgut, Kalai and Naor for half cubes, and later by Ellis for subsets of any size. Our inequality also plays a key role in a recent result on the asymptotic number of maximal independent sets in the cube.    This is joint work with Jeff Kahn.