From a Times Insider column by Sarah Diamond headlined “What Makes a Times Article Go Viral?”:

It started as a typical Tuesday for Amanda Hess, a critic at large at The New York Times. At 10 a.m., an article she had written was published on The Times’s website. But a few hours later, while she was filing her taxes, she received a surprising Slack message from her editor. “You’re the most read thing on the site,” her editor wrote. By 10 p.m., the article was getting thousands of views per minute.

Two days later, her editor messaged again: “I feel like it’s only gaining momentum.”