Meet the face of that viral roommates article
Halima Muhammad's image became a meme after she was photographed by The New York Times.
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As far as Twitter is concerned, there’s no better way to spend an afternoon than dunking on a benign article from The New York Times—and The New York Times is happy to oblige. Anyone who read past the headline of the June 1st piece “Their Solution to the Housing Crisis? Living With Strangers” would have read a thoughtful article about how rising rent and housing prices have resulted in some unique living situations—from the family hosting Ukrainian refugees to the mother who has lived with 90 different roommates over the past ten years. Still, hundreds of people couldn’t resist making the same joke: The Times has discovered roommates.
The share image for this article features one group of apartment-mates that includes 23-year-old Halima Muhammad, who is staring somewhat skeptically at the camera while holding her phone, as if she was just rudely interrupted and not sitting for a professional group portrait. As a result, Muhammad became the unwitting face of the much-derided piece, her image the basis of related memes.
“I just want to say thank you to the New York Times for fulfilling my lifelong dream of going viral for looking like an idiot,” she says in a TikTok sharing some of her “favorite” responses to the piece.
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Muhammad moved in with her three roommates in November of 2020, and living through pre-vaccine COVID together uniquely bonded them. It’s a sweet story, one of many in the larger piece, but Muhammad had no way of knowing how it was going to be perceived—nor that her image would be the one getting shared alongside the jokes and the jabs.
In this interview for paid subscribers, Muhammad and I talked about being the face of a viral article, how she handled all the attention, and what she’d do differently if approached for an article again.