Be Quiet

The infamous and much-maligned “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” article — published in The Atlantic in 2022 and written by Xochitl Gonzalez, a 2023 Pulitzer Prize Finalist who explored “how gentrification and the predominant white culture in the U.S. stifle the physical and emotional expression of racial minorities” — went¹ viral multiple times over the past month. (Seemingly spontaneously at first, and then again after she published a nihilistic essay vaguely in favor of smoking cigarettes, which itself went viral.)