Lifted from the comments – which you’re reading, of course – an item deserving of a little more attention.

The Atlantic is currently promoting an article from its archive, one selected by the editors as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. A choice that is perhaps more telling than intended.

The chosen article, by novelist Xochitl Gonzalez, poses the question, “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” It is sub-headed, “The sound of gentrification is silence.” A racially judgemental tone prevails. Such that the term rich people can be read as meaning white people. Followed by implied tutting.

It begins with an account of life at university – Brown, since you ask – and the merits of Brooklyn hip hop combos:

Ah, those downtrodden minority students, huddled together for mutual safety. Lest the roaming tigers find them.

As I said, the tutting is implied.

And then, belatedly, the realisation that attempts at intellectual activity – say, at an upscale university – tend to require a certain restraint, noise-wise:

Morning lectures being an inconceivable thing, it seems.

Ms Gonzalez, who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is, also tells us how she, “just wanted to be around people in places where nobody told us to shush.” Say, when being a late-night annoyance to roommates and neighbours, a thing that by her own account happens repeatedly, or when playing music in a library. Where other people are trying to study:

A bold admission. One, I suspect, that reveals more than intended. Also, the claim that one can sit down in a library accidentally.

Ms Gonzalez’ tale of woe continues:

Ms Gonzalez, it seems, was being oppressed. Just for being thoughtless and noisy when people are trying to study. Her comfort was being impacted by requests for civility. How very dare they.

As dicentra notes in the comments,

Well, indeed. One of the many things to have somehow not crossed our author’s mind.

Feel her pain. The outrageousness of it all.

Well, yes, It does. You selfish, classless bint.

And note the sly downgrading of an ability to do some actual work as mere comfort. Or an ability to sleep without hearing hip hop once again booming through the wall.

And the Atlantic publishes this – this ode to antisocial selfishness – as if it might leave the reader morally improved. And feeling sympathetic towards the author.

Inevitably, Ms Gonzalez blames her own moral shortcomings on other people’s race and class, as if, by expecting politeness, they were imposing on her in cruel and unusual ways. Because – magic words – “of colour.” But the common variable, the one that’s hard to miss, is the author’s own rudeness and self-absorption. And so, she blunders into the library’s “Absolutely Quiet Room,” and fires up her music.

Oh, and for those of you curious about the author’s precise level of brownness, and thereby magical qualities, and all those rather handy exemptions from reciprocal proprieties, I’ll just leave this here:

Ms Gonzalez tells us that the “absence of noise” – by which she means, consideration for others – is “at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.” And yet she wonders why other people – less selfish people – might want to get away from her. Away from all the noise. And to live somewhere nicer, somewhere she doesn’t.

Readers may wish to ponder the possibility that noise may often be a pretty good measure of other issues. People who don’t care about stopping their neighbours from studying or sleeping may not care about other things too. Other boundaries. Which in turn may go some way to explaining the existence of those quiet, gentrified neighbourhoods, the ones that so offend Ms Gonzalez.

The expectation of consideration is soon, predictably, via contrivance, framed as a form of racial oppression. A way to torment “Black and brown communities,” in which the ethos is “loud and proud.” Because if residents of respectable neighbourhoods object to their nights being disrupted by endless overdriven sound systems, then this is merely “an elite sonic aesthetic: the systemic elevation of quiet over noise.” And almost certainly racist.

“One person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy,” we’re told. “I take pride in saying that we are a loud people.”

An expression of joy by loud people can be found embedded below:

What’s the point? 🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/oIcSwQH82f

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) June 11, 2024

Note the self-satisfied quip, “They’ll be fine. They can buy a house somewhere else.” Today’s words, by the way, are recreational spite.

At which point, readers may wonder how Ms Gonzalez, a novelist, manages to write her books amid the fashionably vibrant racket that she recommends to others. All that shouting and shrieking and “ceaseless music” that she finds so liberating and authentic. Wouldn’t those extended and rather complicated trains of thought be disrupted, and likely made impossible, by all the shouting and laughing, all the whumping and thumping, all those jolly sirens?

Happily, an answer is provided in the pages of Elle Décor, in which Ms Gonzalez opined some two months earlier:

This point is expanded upon:

And so, our silence-needing novelist sought out “a gorgeous historic house in downtown Kingston, New York.” Ah, yes. An “upstate vacation rental.”

Perhaps Ms Gonzalez was hoping that readers of her Atlantic article – the one about noise being so vibrant and racially affirming – would not stumble across her Elle Décor piece, published weeks earlier, which rather calls into question her own later claims. And which, it has to be said, suggests a certain pretence, a certain hypocrisy.

In short, then, your desire for peace and quiet is terribly problematic, and probably racist. While hers, not so much. Which is enormously convenient. If not entirely convincing.

Previously in the Atlantic:

A woman oppressed by crumbs.

And another expensively educated Brooklynite who insists that crossword puzzles are “one of the systemic forces that threaten women.”

And then there was the attempt to convince us that chronic thievery is totally fine and nothing to complain about, provided it’s being done to someone else. Someone who isn’t an Atlantic contributor, presumably.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the Atlantic referred to Elon Musk as, and I quote, “a far-right activist.”