Two recent arti­cles in pub­li­ca­tions have got­ten some buzz. One writ­ten by AP reporter Luis Andres Henao looks at a rise of young adult inter­est in Friends and pro­files a dra­mat­ic increase in atten­dance at Arch Street Meet­ing in Philadel­phia. It’s been reprint­ed in a lot of news­pa­pers. It quotes a Valerie Goodman:

“It feels like I can have a minute to breathe. It’s dif­fer­ent than hav­ing a moment of med­i­ta­tion in my apart­ment because there’s still all of the dis­trac­tions around,” Good­man says. “And it’s crazy being in a room full of oth­er peo­ple that are all there to expe­ri­ence that themselves.”

The oth­er is a beau­ti­ful essay by a new UK Friend, who explains the appeal of the silence:

It was as if some­one had turned down the vol­ume of the world, and all that remained was my feel­ings, sit­ting raw and open like a wound. Rather than run­ning, I sat for an hour and let them wash over me. I left with a fresh­er per­spec­tive and spent the rest of the day in a calm daze. For the first time in a while, I felt anchored to some­thing greater than myself.