This article feels pretty disingenuous in a number of different ways. To avoid posting a wall of text, I'll summarize that The Atlantic is creating a narrative

This article feels pretty disingenuous in a number of different ways. To avoid posting a wall of text, I'll summarize that The Atlantic is creating a narrative about what the narrative was, that way they can act like serious adults while just feeding us their own narrative. The media was caught on their ass with this story, but never fear The Atlantic is here. With a big dose of Captain Hindsight who knows things that weren't public at the time to trash talk people speaking at the time. To insinuate everyone investing was a dolt that didn't know stocks go down too. And to reassure everybody that the retail investor should never be trusted with anything sharper than a index fund, that there is no takeaway about the market to be found here at all, and we should only worry about pushing politicians for more income redistribution.