Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers to defend the proposition that their favorite cuisine is the world’s best.

Rob wrote on behalf of a southeast-Asian standout:

The world’s best cuisine cannot be one in which its greatest dishes are accessible only on rare or expensive occasions. Everyone should be able to enjoy a cuisine’s must-try meals, regardless of their budget, nutritional needs, or level of adventurousness. For this reason, Vietnamese cuisine might be the world’s best.

For one, you won’t need a map or a Michelin star to find something good to eat when visiting Vietnam. The best meals are prepared and served on the street. The tables are usually made of cheap plastic and the stools are sometimes only 12 inches off the ground. You’ll spend the equivalent of one to two American dollars, on a random sidewalk in Saigon, and it will be one the richest, most delicious meals of your life. Two, it’s little wonder that Vietnamese food is so often named among the world’s healthiest. The ingredients are fresh and the combinations are light. It’s not so rich or heavy that it can be consumed only as an indulgence. Three, it’s up to you to decide how you want it. While the chefs and cooks of other global cuisines may be often unwilling to deviate from tradition to appeal to popular or idiosyncratic tastes, the Vietnamese are much more accommodating. Low tolerance for anything spicy? Don’t worry; you add your own chiles. Not sure if you’re comfortable eating that? Start with a bowl of pho and a banh mi—a soup and a sandwich. And if you’re clumsy with chopsticks, there’s probably a fork at the table.

The world has so many incredible cuisines. Each can claim complex, satisfying, memorable meals. But Vietnamese is the best. Everyone can enjoy it.

Scott prefers the aquatic snacks of the United States:

My favorite cuisine is good old American seafood from all across the country: lobster, cod, and chowder from New England; blue crab and oysters from the mid-Atlantic; catfish, shrimp and grits, and she-crab soup from the South; grouper, mahi, and stone-crab claws from Florida; crawdads, seafood gumbo, étouffée, and blackened fish from Louisiana; gulf shrimp, ceviche, and black drum from Texas; cioppino, sushi, and fish tacos from California; Dungeness crab, fresh salmon, and geoduck in the Pacific Northwest; sautéed lake trout, perch, and walleye from the inland freshwater lakes … plus hundreds of others I missed.

All of it fresh, amazing, and delicious.

Mitchell revealed his pick reluctantly:

For the record, I’m the type of person who orders anything “drunken” on the Thai menu, reads Marcella Hazan’s cookbooks for fun, and waits months for a reservation at Owamni, so picking a favorite cuisine feels almost like cheating on my significant other. (I feel like somehow the boeuf bourguignon I plan on cooking next weekend is gonna hear I didn’t pick French cuisine, then promptly decide to scorch during the braise.)

Caveats aside, I love food from the Levant, specifically Lebanese cuisine. The reason for my adoration is the ingredients they use, combined with simple cooking methods and accessible flavors: pomegranate molasses, preserved lemons, za’atar, every herb under the sun (the region was central to the spice trade), hot peppers introduced from the Americas, lamb and other funky meats, fresh pita. I understand this is just a list of ingredients, but my mouth started watering just typing them. And even though these ingredients are all over the map, the cooking methods are straightforward: raw salads with olive oil and lemon; kofta cooked over hot coals; bulgur rehydrated with herbs in boiling water. And in the end, all the notes get hit—the raw garlic spice of toum; the bracing acidity of labneh; the sticky sweet crispness of baklava; salty olives from some of the oldest trees in the world.

But I guess it makes sense that one of the cradles of civilization would’ve ended up figuring out the best food. Ancient, fresh, complex, and simple—Lebanese cuisine checks all the delicious boxes.

Bekke’s favorite cuisine is “down-home Midwestern farm cooking”:

Perhaps this is due to my childhood experience with my grandmother’s freshly slaughtered chickens, fried and served with homemade country gravy; fresh vegetables from her garden; homemade bread and jam. My great-aunt Rosa made the best chiffon pies (a childhood delight), and my grandmother and I spent many happy hours baking gingersnaps and other cookies. For years, my birthday preference was pecan pie, not cake. Even today, the foods served at family and community gatherings are always delicious, although not always the healthiest, and served in great abundance.

And, best of all, they’re made with love.  

M.’s favorite cuisine belongs to an island:

I lived for several years in Japan—first with a family of wedding-kimono makers and then on my own in a working-class neighborhood in Tokyo. I prefer the food I found in the various food stands in Monzen-Nakacho to the upper-class cuisine I ate regularly during my first stay. My second visit I was a student at a university in Japan living on a small stipend. The last week of every month I’d be down to my last few hundred yen. I’d go to the ramen shop a block from my tiny apartment and order a plain bowl of noodles.

The owner asked me where I was from when he realized I could speak Japanese. What was I doing in Japan? he asked. It turned out I was studying at the same university his son was attending. I told him I had received a scholarship to study Japanese literature. From then on I was treated to bowls of the most amazing ramen I’ve ever eaten: miso ramen; tonkatsu (pork) ramen; shoyu ramen (soy sauce based). He put vegetables and various meat or seafood in my soup but charged me only for a simple bowl of ramen with nothing added. Eventually, he simply wouldn’t take my money. Those noodles! All homemade.

I cannot make my miso ramen or soup taste anywhere near his, but I could live on Japanese food and be very happy: sushi—not the huge rolls at American Japanese restaurants but the nigiri and maki of Japan—are bite-size pieces of wonder; cold tofu and fried tofu; mackerel; unagi; Japanese curry; tempura. And even teriyaki—but not the sweet syrup found in too many places in this country. I make sticky rice with a small piece of salmon, nori, and some green tea in the bowl and I am happy.

Oscar’s favorite is mine too:

Definitely Mexican. World-class. Complex. Nuanced. Accessible. Simple. Historical.  

Virginia defends the cliché answer with relish:

Things are typically cliché for a reason, and that is the case with French cuisine. It is my favorite for so many reasons, and not all of them have to do with the food items themselves.

I worked in the music industry for some 20-odd years and had the good fortune of attending the Marché International du Disque et de l'Édition Musicale, or Midem, held each year in Cannes. The company I worked for did it in style, putting us all in the legendary Carlton hotel and permitting us to fly in a day or two ahead and stay a day or two later. I took full advantage of that to soak up as much of the French Riviera as I could.

I fell in love with the total sensory experience of French cuisine. It moved beyond the incredibly creamy and rich silkiness of the yogurt served in glass jars, so thick and seductive as it slid past my lips first thing in the morning with a slight tang—just enough to rouse my sleepy mind delightfully. It went beyond the café crème served in china cups that might have been older than this country. It was so much more than the exquisite salade Niçoise at the café a few doors down. It is all those lovely ingredients prepared with intense attention to every little detail of every ingredient to offer diners’ tastebuds a true feast. But it is also the complete sensory experience of dining in France.

Alongside the glasses of champagne, which are so aptly assigned the adjective sparkling, and the fluffy clouds of pastry, the French served up candlelight or a sunny sky, conversation or pensive hours, a view of the Mediterranean or 100-year-old candlelit stone walls adorned with quick sketches by Picasso and Matisse, among others, and a look of disappointed condemnation for an American woman who was silly enough to rush through a meal because she sat alone in a packed restaurant at lunchtime. That experience slammed home to me the importance to the French of savoring not only one’s meal but, rather, the entire meal hour. Every minute of it, and with every sense. No one minds a woman dining alone. But they do mind her rushing through the meal.

After the disdain tossed at me by the staff during that rushed lunch of mine, I made sure to maximize every moment of my time in France each year to just absorb it all and enjoy it to the fullest. In one of my last years there, I had dinner with a colleague from New York I only saw once each year, at Midem, and she marveled at how brave I was to venture out of the hotel and go to restaurants alone, especially since my French was and still is very rudimentary and meager. I told her it had nothing to do with bravery and everything to do with a determination to not miss out on anything.

Whenever work sent us anywhere international, I ensured that I had a free weekend, during which I would visit a grocery store and walk around the local shops. But no matter where in the world I was, those experiences always brought to mind French cuisine, and I suppose they always will. I do not know if I will ever return to experience French cuisine in France, so I have learned to make the country’s pastries and salads and I seek out its yogurt and champagnes whenever I can. And above all else, I slow down and savor every bit of the experience of those foods, from putting my hands into the flour mixture to the last sip of a hot café. The cuisine reminds me of one of the most important life lessons I’ve had—life is fleeting, but our senses can make each minute of it special if you will only let it.

Eden counters that we all know a neighboring cuisine is better:

There are so many cuisines to choose from that this question is tricky to answer. What can top the American breakfast, with its hearty scrambles, crispy bacon, and luscious French toast? Is there anything better than a hot, steaming bowl of pho with the thin slices of raw steak that cook in the rich, anise-tinged broth? What about tacos with crispy carnitas that melt in your mouth? Spicy curries, french fries, sushi, pastrami sandwiches, and fried chicken are all to die for.

However, one cuisine trumps all the rest: Everyone knows it is Italian food. When I read your question, the first thing that popped into my head was a pan full of cheesy, comforting lasagne. Risotto. Bolognese. Vongole. Cacio e pepe. PIZZA! Tell me you can live without pizza and pasta, and I will tell you that it is not a life worth living.

Miriam’s choice is the cuisine of her ancestors:

Ashkenazi Jewish cooking is brown and beige. It's not fashionable or garlic-heavy, and it excludes lots of delectable things like pork, shellfish, and the combination of meat and dairy. Moreover, I discovered it only in my teens and 20s, after both my grandmothers had died. It is not the taste of my childhood. But it’s haimish—it is the taste of my roots.

Like Jewish cooking everywhere, Ashkenazi food is the cuisine of central and eastern European Jews’ gentile neighbors, adapted to Jewish dietary laws and with matzoh added. Now with so many Ashkenazi-style restaurants closing their doors, Polish and Ukrainian restaurants are where I usually go for a taste of nostalgia. Just yesterday I read the bad news in Tablet that whitefish chubs may soon be a thing of the past; another delight bites the dust.

I can’t convince gentiles that Ashkenazi Jewish cooking is the best. But I can write this love letter and valediction.

Mary Ann writes:

If I had to choose just one item, it would be Hokkaido milk bread; I can toast it, make sandwiches, make pizza, butter it, or eat it plain. It’s versatile and delicious.

Phoebe cooks all the time and one cuisine stands out:

My favorite cuisine is Middle Eastern, specifically, from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Israel. To me, it checks every single box. The food is so varied. The flavors are astoundingly complex. Meals include tons of fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, nuts, and, last but definitely not least, spices. The dishes take on different personalities and different regional tastes. And it’s one of the world’s healthiest cuisines, based on what research we’ve got. My litmus test is “What could I eat every day, for every meal, and be happy?” This is it.

Bobby describes his favorite meal, which has changed:

For a long time my go-to has been a traditional turkey dinner with all of the fixings and sides, but it’s a heavy meal that necessarily includes a lot of potential allergens and dietary restrictions (gluten, meat, etc.).

Just earlier this week I was thinking how a nice bowl of hot ramen was probably my current No. 1. At its base form, ramen only requires a few simple ingredients, and it rules. It’s hot and savory and chewy and slurpy and filling. But then you can add meat and eggs and more veggies and spice and all sorts of things to create a variety of sensory experiences, all while never sacrificing the core of what makes ramen great in the first place. Plus, if you really want some cronch, you can get karaage on the side at many ramen places. And hot green tea or hot sake to drink? Damn, now that’s a perfect meal on a rainy spring day.

Emily hearts New York City:

The city has its own style of pizza, bagels, cheesecake, and hot dogs. Not to mention the foods that are quintessential to a NYC deli: The pastrami! The chopped cheese!  Black-and-white cookies, even! All unbeatable, in my opinion, spawning countless “NYC-style” eateries worldwide. And all that culinary excellence coming out of just one city? No cuisine on earth can compare. I moved away two years ago and I miss it every day.

Jaleelah likes Arab food:

Arab food has everything you need. The peasant dishes are packed with superfoods—my grandmother finds it hilarious that tahini and freekeh have become health-food crazes. The salads are the best in the world. There’s no pointless filler like lettuce; the dishes are made to be flavourful. I could eat tabbouleh for breakfast every day. And most of the dishes are relatively cheap and easy to make. One $20 shawarma platter will give you at least three balanced meals.

And Joshua prefers the local cuisine wherever he happens to be:

As a Michigander, I am extremely partial to our style of pizza: square, in a pan, with a practically burnt crust. Delicious. Or the Detroit Coney dog: Chili, mustard, and onions smothered over a hot dog. Or the pasty, a meat-pie creation with a rich history in the mining culture of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

When I travel within the United States, I never seek out the familiar. I avoid restaurant chains of any kind. I don’t rely on Google Maps or Yelp to find a bite to eat. I ask someone local (my Uber driver, the hotel desk staff, etc.) where they go for takeout. In a country with a long history of immigration, every city has its own unique food scene. I always seek out the best plate of food I can find for under $15. You eat crabs when you are in Baltimore. Lobster in New England. BBQ in Kansas City. Gumbo in New Orleans. You drown yourself in cheese in Wisconsin. This world is so much more exciting when you eat the food that everyone else is eating in that specific place, but not necessarily anywhere else.

Thanks for all your evocative answers––I’ll see you later this week.

“What would it do to the American mythology of rock music to say that its pioneers were Black, queer people?” the ethnomusicologist Fredara Hadley asks in the new documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything, out Friday. It’s a valid question, and the film offers an exuberant answer. In order to tell the story of the pathbreaking piano-rocker whose work still pulses in roadside diners and on wedding dance floors, the director, Lisa Cortés, uses animated sparkles and montages of rainbow fringe and high heels. Along with Hall of Famers such as Mick Jagger, commentary comes from the ever-fabulous actor Billy Porter and a few Black scholars of gender, race, and the arts. They argue that “Tutti Frutti” was not just a hot song; it was a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the heteropatriarchy.  

All of this may sound like a provocation, but it’s mostly an assertion of fact. In addition to popularizing the combo of chugging-train drum beats and lusty wails, Little Richard personally tutored the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and directly inspired James Brown and David Bowie. A wearer of eyeliner who variously described himself as gay or omnisexual over the years, he built upon a preexisting queer lineage. When Richard’s father threw him out of his Macon, Georgia, home at an early age, Richard was taken in by the owners of a queer-leaning nightclub. He’d soon learn from drag queens, bawdy chanteuses, and a few Black singers now legendary for defying gender norms: the gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who brought Little Richard onstage for the first time; the bouffant-wearing Esquerita, who taught him to play piano; and the “Prince of the Blues,” Billy Wright, who inspired his love of makeup.

Little of this history is unknown or hidden. Indeed, the energy coursing through this essayistic documentary comes in large part from Richard’s own self-mythologizing. He often touted his own importance as the “architect,” rightful “king,” and “quasar”—brightest star—of rock and roll. He spoke matter-of-factly about sex and sexuality (he was also, he said, the “queen” of rock and roll). As it retells his rise, Cortés’s film suggests how so flamboyant a figure became widely beloved in the face of racism and homophobia: To some white audiences, a feminized Black man was less threatening than any other kind. The movie also explores how cultural appropriation—or “obliteration,” as the writer and sociologist Zandria Robinson calls it—long kept Richard from getting his due (recent years have begun to see broader recognition of the debt that Elvis and other white rockers owed him).

[Read: Little Richard set the mold by breaking it]

Really the film wants to argue for an inextricable, even metaphysical, connection between Richard’s impact and his identity. “Queerness is not just about sexuality but about a presence in a space that is different from what we require or expect—different from the norm,” Robinson says at one point. According to this framework, Richard’s musical breakthroughs had revolutionary social effects, inviting segregated and repressed audiences to integrate and loosen up. His example liberated Paul McCartney to scream and Jagger to shimmy, and made it possible for Lil Nas X and Miley Cyrus to simultaneously scandalize and seduce audiences today.

This view of Richard is inspiring and convincing. But it squares awkwardly with the fact that Richard, at various times throughout his life, aligned with conservative Christianity and renounced his past work. The first epiphany happened in 1957, when Richard witnessed what he believed to be apocalyptic omens while on tour. He then enrolled at a Seventh-day Adventist college in Alabama, where he reportedly told students that he would buy back and destroy any records of his that they owned. He would return to, and escape from, the secular musical world a few times in the decades to come. The final years of his life were spent ensconced in church life. His public speaking emphasized the incompatibility of rock and roll—and his formerly gay lifestyle—with the teachings of Jesus.

What happened? A few reasons for his religiosity seem apparent. As a kid, Richard dreamed of becoming a minister like his father. As Jagger notes in the documentary, if you have the idea that secular music is the devil’s music drilled into you during childhood, you’re going to have a complicated adulthood as a secular musician. Watching the film, it also becomes apparent that many of Richard’s Christian awakenings coincided with moments when the excesses of his rock-star life were especially pronounced: a long-haul tour in the ’50s, a period of heavy drug use in the ’70s.

[Read: ‘Rock and roll ain’t what it used to be’]

What the documentary doesn’t note are the familiar, even poignant, dimensions of Richard’s seemingly shocking reversals. Many other iconoclastic musicians—Prince, Ye (formerly Kanye West), Bob Dylan—have, at various points, found God and begun reevaluating or neglecting their earlier work. The history of popular music is in part a history of bold people changing the world, being rewarded with riches, and then facing the question of how to survive burnout, addiction, and the waning of public affection. Endless rebellion is taxing and has, for many stars, proved fatal—is it that surprising for religion to beckon as a refuge? To a viewer of the film, Richard’s spiritual journey raises questions about him as a human, not a symbol. I wanted to understand his significance to the church communities he joined; I wanted to know whether those around him found him to be at peace in his later years.

The documentary, however, mostly treats Richard’s sanctified chapters as a disappointment, a counterrevolutionary subplot. Robinson notes the “harm” Richard caused when he started spouting homophobia. Sir Lady Java, a trans performer who was a good friend of Richard’s, says, “I feel he betrayed gay people ... But I do understand. You’re not strong enough to take it. I understand that.” “Harm” and “betrayed” aren’t overstating the case: As today’s legislative and cultural campaigns against queer rights show, what public figures say matters. Still, it’s hard not to also read a tinge of personal judgment in the movie’s appraisals. The scholar Jason King puts Richard’s trajectory this way: “He was very, very good at liberating other people through his example. He was not good at liberating himself.” The film sometimes takes an elegiac, near-tragic tone—which is a bit strange when you consider that Richard died at the ripe old age of 87, with his cultural renown secure and his energies having been devoted to personal salvation.

As the title I Am Everything hints, the film wants to do what Richard once did: make space for complex, unruly expression. But conflating personal identity with political projects, construing queerness so broadly that it becomes a synonym for subversive, sometimes flattens reality. Queer people can be revolutionaries, but they’re also negotiators, crowd-pleasers, survivors. How telling that the “Tutti Frutti” that changed the world was not the bawdy version that Richard originally wrote—“If it don’t fit, don’t force it”—but the one he allowed to be toned down by the songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie, who’s shown in full church-lady regalia in I Am Everything. Little Richard’s life was no tidy story of transcendence from his times and circumstances, because no one’s is. What he showed is that rock and roll, like queerness, is not a break from the past; it’s a dance with it.

In July 2020, at the height of protests over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, Daniel Perry considered killing someone.

“I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” Perry, then a 35-year-old Army sergeant, wrote to a friend, the Austin Chronicle reported. It wasn’t the first time Perry had spoken about killing people on social media or in messages with friends. On another occasion, Perry mused, “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

After all this talk, Perry did shoot a Black Lives Matter protester in downtown Austin, an Air Force veteran and libertarian activist named Garrett Foster, who had been legally carrying an AK-47 at the protest. Perry, who was working as a rideshare driver, sped his car into the crowd, witnesses said, then opened fire on Foster. Perry claimed that he had acted in self-defense and that Foster was raising his rifle, but prosecutorial witnesses told the jury during his trial that Foster had done nothing of the sort. “I believe he was going to aim at me,” Perry told police in an initial interview, having called law enforcement and turned himself in after the shooting. “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”​​

[Esau McCaulley: America isn’t ready to truly understand the Buffalo shooting]

Thursday night, the judge in Perry’s case unsealed a filing that also contained messages the jury did not see before the verdict. The document shows Perry sharing racist memes, referring to Black protesters as “monkeys,” and musing about “hunting Muslims in Europe.” Perry’s attorneys are reportedly seeking a new trial.  

Perry had lived out his fantasy. There was only one problem: His public and private expressions of violent aggression toward protesters, and his decision to drive his car into the crowd, led a Texas jury to conclude that the shooting was unjustified. The state’s stand-your-ground law does not allow those who provoke a confrontation with the aim of using lethal violence to justify their actions as self-defense. Proving that intent sets a deliberately high standard for prosecutors, because it requires strong evidence of what the accused is thinking. Yet the prosecutors in this case managed to do so in a very gun-friendly state, as the journalist Radley Balko writes, because of “ample evidence that Perry intended to harm the protesters,” including testimony that Perry had asked a friend about the legality of “other incidents in which someone had shot at protesters.” The documentation of ill intent here is unusually comprehensive.  

Convicted of murder, Perry became a right-wing political martyr. Last weekend, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott announced that he would ask the Texas parole board to recommend a pardon for Perry, following coverage from the Fox News host Tucker Calrson portraying his conviction as unjust and criticizing Abbott. Carlson characterized Perry’s conviction by a jury of his peers in one of the most pro-gun states in the union not as a result of the atypical volume of evidence, but as a conspiracy by the liberal billionaire George Soros, who paid “people to put his political opponents in jail.” Fox News has a disproportionate influence over the only constituency Abbott heeds, which is Republican primary voters.

At the center of this series of events is the right-wing fantasy of murdering political opponents and getting away with it, one that the firearm industry has used to sell weapons and that ambitious right-wing politicians have used to win votes. Put simply, some conservatives believe that Perry’s conviction was unjust because they do not believe that it should be a crime to kill a Black Lives Matter “rioter,” a description that in the right-wing imagination applies to any and all BLM protesters regardless of their actions.

There are a number of factors involved in the popularity of this fantasy, including urban-rural polarization and the GOP’s decision to press its advantage in an American electoral system that rewards the dispersed geography of its political coalition. This approach demands that Republican leaders feed their supporters a constant diet of culture-war red meat in order to maintain a sense that their constituents’ way of life is in danger of imminent destruction. Such catastrophism has both inspired and been inspired by a shift in how the firearms industry sells weapons.

Since the expiration of the federal assault-weapons ban in 2004, the firearm industry has juiced its sales by inundating conservatives with advertising that promotes guns as a cure for compromised masculinity, and implies that they need to stockpile firearms for an inevitable political conflict in which they will finally get to kill people they don’t like. That’s partly how we ended up with a haggard pop star so unnerved by an inclusive corporate ad campaign that he shoots at beer cans to self-soothe, a tough guy literally triggered by rainbows.

Gun sales have risen dramatically over the past few years. “Those sales have only confirmed the industry’s strategy for achieving growth, and so the marketing effort has become only more addicted to conspiracy-theory-fueled political partisanship,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms-industry executive, wrote in The Atlantic in 2022. “America is seeing the deadly results of the violence incubated by these dark advertising fantasies.”

[Ryan Busse: The gun industry created a new consumer. Now it’s killing us.]

One might question how often guns are actually used in self-defense, but marketing guns for self-defense or hunting at least has no inherent partisan salience, and America has a long cultural and legal tradition of firearm ownership for such purposes. Perhaps the crucial difference here is the shift from individual to collective self-defense—instead of just selling the possibility of defending your home from a nighttime intruder, the industry and its allies are now selling the idea that buying a gun turns you into a soldier defending civilization itself from the barbarian hordes. You know, people who disagree with them politically. In this worldview, violence against such people is by definition “self-defense,” regardless of the specific circumstances.  

The people who have adopted this political and consumer identity will not necessarily act out violently. In fact, the overwhelming majority of them will not. In a country of more than 300 million with lax gun laws, some small number will act on these beliefs, to bloody and tragic results. But those who have embraced such an identity will be more willing to rationalize, excuse, or defend political violence against their opponents when it does happen. They will also be more open to the illiberal use of state force against those they see as foes in an existential battle.  

Advertising guns for an imminent political conflict has reshaped American gun culture, enlarging a voting constituency that opposes all firearm restrictions, in part because its members dream about someday engaging in murderous political violence. This faction also demands that politicians shape the law so that they can do so with impunity.  

That political pressure was bearing down on Abbott when he made the decision to request that the pardon board grant clemency to Perry. The injustice is that Perry was convicted of murder for killing someone who deserved to die because he was supporting a left-wing cause. The legal system built by decades of Republican dominance in Texas was meant to justify such killings, and when it failed to do so, the governor had to intervene. Facing prison time for shooting a political enemy would spoil the reverie sold to conservatives by their leaders and by the firearm industry—the promise that one day, they too could kill one of the barbarian horde and get away with it. And that would be unjust.

“Millennials are many things, but above all, they are murderers,” Mashable noted in 2017, introducing a list of 70 items and institutions that Millennials were purported to have “killed,” including napkins, breakfast cereal, department stores, the 9-to-5 workday, and marriage. The list was tongue-in-cheek—the cereal aisle persists—but it captured something essential about a generation that has reshaped old habits of American life.

Even amid this slaughter of tradition, Millennials are best known for another characteristic: how broke they are. Millennials, it’s often said, are the first American generation that will do worse than its parents financially.

Pick up a book on Millennials, or wander into a discussion about them online, and this theme pops up again and again: The once-optimistic children of the 1980s and early ’90s are now wheezing under the burden of college debt, too poor to buy houses or start families, sucker punched by a hostile economy that bears no resemblance to the one their parents enjoyed as young adults.

“We’re only now starting to grasp the degree to which we have gotten screwed,” Jill Filipovic wrote in her 2020 book, OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind, “and we’re responding with desperation and sometimes anger.” The famous rebuke that Filipovic takes as the book’s title isn’t mere snark, she writes; it’s “a final, frustrated dismissal from people suffering years of political and economic neglect.” In a Morning Consult poll last year, 45 percent of Millennials, compared with 35 percent of all adults, agreed with the statement “Because of my money situation, I will never have the things I want in life.” Fifty-two percent of Millennials said they were concerned that “the money I have or will save won’t last.”

The mythology of the generation begins with the participation trophies and limitless expectations granted to its members in childhood by parents and teachers newly eager to build self-esteem. (I wrote about the implications of that approach in my 2006 book, Generation Me.) But the story is centered on the wreckage of the Great Recession, when those youthful expectations violently collided with the worst financial crisis in nearly a century. The sense of betrayal in OK Boomer and other writings is both palpable and understandable. If anything, it only seems to have hardened over time.

Impressions of generations tend to form early, and they often get cast in amber. As a scholar of generations, I’m well aware of that. But even I was surprised when I returned to my study of Millennials to look at the generation as it enters middle age.

The surprise was this: Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.

This is terrific news. And yet it’s not all good news, because the belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.

That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?

The Highest Incomes Ever

The Great Recession of 2008 was hard on American incomes, especially those of young Millennials (born roughly between 1980 and 1994), who were just entering the job market. By 2012, the median household income of 25-to-34-year-olds had dropped 13 percent from its peak in 2000. But the mid-2010s saw the beginnings of a turnaround that has continued ever since. By 2019, households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation. That year, according to the Current Population Survey, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, income for the median Millennial household was about $9,000 higher than that of the median Gen X household at the same age, and about $10,000 more than the median Boomer household, in 2019 dollars. The coronavirus pandemic didn’t meaningfully change this story: Household incomes of 25-to-44-year-olds were at historic highs in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available. Median incomes for these households have generally risen since 1967, albeit with some significant dips and plateaus. And like each generation that came before, Millennials have benefited from that upward trend.

Household income is only one lens, but individual income shows largely the same thing. Booms and recessions push incomes up and down, but although many media stories have tended to associate Millennials almost exclusively with the latter, they’ve now experienced both, and in a big way: Increases in income since 2014 have been steep.

In this, Millennials trace a pattern similar to the Gen Xers before them. Early Gen Xers, too, entered the job market during a recession, and the generation was subject to dire predictions about its economic future (one 1995 book, Welcome to the Jungle, by Geoffrey T. Holtz, described Gen X as the “Impoverished Generation”). But those predictions didn’t hold up after the economy rebounded later in the ’90s. The Great Recession was no doubt a more harrowing experience for young adults than the recession Gen X faced, but the income stagnation that followed it nonetheless lasted only a few years. Over the past half century, the longest period of falling or stagnant wages was from the ’70s to the mid-’90s, when Boomers were young workers. My point is not that Millennials should consider themselves fortunate—I don’t believe that—but rather that economic prospects can change greatly as a generation ages, and especially as it reaches its peak earning years.

The Millennial income rebound has been broad as well as steep. The income of young adults across racial groups has risen since 2014. By my analysis, Black and Latino Americans ages 25 to 44 in 2021 were making more money than Black and Latino Silents, Boomers, and Gen Xers at the same age. The U.S. is not without economic inequities, many of them racial. But Black and Latino Millennials are not falling behind previous generations when it comes to their income. Instead, most are getting ahead.

Two groups have not outpaced the generations that came before: men and people with less education. Millennial men, on average, have not seen the income increases that Millennial women have (more on that later)—a divergence at least partly explained by the growing gap in educational attainment between men and women. And overall, the median income of Americans with a four-year college degree has steadily risen while the income of those with only a high-school degree has fallen. This trend is not new, though it is troubling.

[From the September 2017 issue: Jean M. Twenge on smartphones and the post-Millennial generation’s mental health]

Yet there are also far fewer high-school-only graduates among Millennials than among previous generations, and many more with a college degree. Millennials are the first American generation in which more than one out of three had a four-year college degree by their late 20s, up from one out of four when Gen Xers were in that age bracket. And two out of three Millennials have attended college for at least a year.

That has enabled more people to move into higher income brackets, and is one of the main reasons Millennials are doing relatively well financially. But even the story of the generation’s have-nots is complicated, and hardly Dickensian. The least fortunate members of the Millennial generation seem better protected economically than those of prior generations: Fewer Millennials were in poverty in 2019 than were Boomers and Gen Xers at the same age (in 1987 and 2004, years in which the economy was likewise strong). For all the talk of America’s tattered social safety net, that net has in some ways been reinforced since Millennials became adults. The Affordable Care Act extended health-care coverage, and federal-government support during the pandemic actually caused poverty to fall in 2020 and 2021, once you account for that support. Whether because of federal social policy, minimum-wage increases in some states, or other factors, poverty is not any more common among Millennials today than it was among previous generations.

A Generation of Homeowners

A house is perhaps the most tangible embodiment of the American dream. Millennials’ housing woes have featured prominently in media accounts of the generation’s economic (and life) problems. “There should be a Millennial edition of Monopoly where you just walk around the board paying rent, never able to buy anything,” a Twitter comedian who goes by “Mutable Joe” joked in 2016. BuzzFeed ran a story last year on 24 “ways Millennials became homeowners,” filled with decidedly sui generis anecdotes. One described someone who’d been hit by a truck and won a lawsuit, covering their down payment. Short of getting concussed by a semi, the article suggested, Millennials had little chance of becoming homeowners.

But contrary to that narrative, Millennials’ homeownership rates in 2020 were only slightly behind Boomers’ and Gen Xers’ at the same age: 50 percent of Boomers owned their own home as 25-to-39-year-olds, compared with 48 percent of Millennials, hardly a difference deserving of headlines or social-media memes.

Both house prices and mortgage rates are higher now than in 2020. That’s bad news for Millennials who haven’t yet bought a house but want to do so soon. Nonetheless, many older Millennial homeowners got great deals on their most important purchase, having passed into their 30s during the early 2010s, one of the most fortuitous times to buy a house in recent memory. It was Gen Xers, by and large, who were in their prime home-buying years as the great housing bubble of the aughts inflated, and who went underwater when that bubble popped. People who bought a house in 2005, for instance, saw their home’s value plummet 21 percent over six years, on average, and not regain its purchase price until 2014. Older Millennials, in contrast, were buying into a depressed market that subsequently rebounded; houses bought in 2011, for instance, appreciated 40 percent over the next six years. Almost everyone who bought a house in the U.S. before 2019 saw its value shoot up during the pandemic years. And until the past year, just about all Millennial home buyers were able to lock in mortgage interest rates that were at historic lows.

[Read: The next generation of NIMBYs]

These are national figures, and the picture will vary from place to place. (Housing has not been a bargain in New York City, for instance, where a very large number of Millennial journalists live.) But on the whole, Millennials have not been economically unlucky as to homeownership—if anything, the reverse is true.

Closing the Wealth Gap

Between the toll that the Great Recession took on Millennials’ early careers and the college-loan debt that many of them carry, one might expect this generation to be living more precariously than previous ones, with little financial cushion.

And there’s at least some truth to that. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis made big headlines in 2018 when it announced that among families headed by people born in the 1980s (older Millennials), median wealth was 34 percent lower than what you’d expect based on the wealth of previous generations at the same age. The report, which analyzed data through 2016, theorized that Millennials might be a “lost generation” when it came to wealth.

But when the St. Louis Fed updated its analysis of Millennial wealth a few years later, using 2019 data, it found significant progress. By then, older Millennials lagged only 11 percent behind previous generations at the same age. That progress was uneven: The gap was larger for Millennials without a college degree (19 percent) and even more so for Black Millennials (50 percent). Younger Millennials (born in the ’90s and still in their mid-20s at the time) also faced a bigger gap. Still, since 2019, both housing and the stock market have increased in value, last year’s swoon notwithstanding. Recent analysis by the Fed, including data through the middle of 2022, has shown average Millennial wealth to be neck and neck with the wealth of Gen X at the same age.

Does debt alter this picture? Millennials are without a doubt more heavily burdened by college loans than previous generations. Black Millennials are particularly likely to carry heavy student-loan balances. But again, the Fed’s analysis already takes that into account: Its wealth figures net out college loans and other debts.

Even the wealth gap that exists today may mean less than it first appears to. Because more Millennials went to college and graduate school, they started their careers later, on average, than Boomers and Gen Xers did. On those grounds alone, one would expect a lag in wealth building. But more education typically means higher lifetime earnings—and thus stronger savings potential as the years go by. Many Millennials are just entering their peak earning years and have more earning power than the generations before them.

Meanwhile, the long trend in American life spans has generally been upward. The high-wage manufacturing jobs that Boomers could count on right out of high school also tended to take a toll on the body over time; the shift toward services and office work enables longer career tails. As the saying goes, 60 is the new 50, and this will benefit Millennials in myriad ways.

The New Economics of Family

“I see ‘Millennials Aren’t Having Babies’ is making the rounds again,” tweeted “pokey pup,” a self-identified Millennial, in November 2021. “No one is getting paid enough, there’s not adequate maternity leave, no one can afford hospital bills, most of us can’t afford a house—like what did you think would happen?” The tweet got more than 120,000 likes and more than 25,000 retweets.

Although Millennials’ economic outlook isn’t so dire as many social-media posts would suggest, something is clearly holding Millennials back from having children—and finances are, indirectly, at least a plausible culprit.

[From the July/August 2013 issue: Jean M. Twenge on how long you can wait to have a baby]

As high-school seniors, 95 percent of Millennials said they wanted at least one child. Four out of 10 said they wanted three or more. Those desires have persisted. In the 2018 General Social Survey of adults, Millennials’ average ideal number of children was 2.6. Yet total fertility—the estimated number of children a woman will have in her lifetime based on the year’s births—was just 1.66 in 2021.

Family income itself doesn’t seem to be to blame—after all, Millennials’ incomes are higher than those of previous generations. But the pattern of income—particularly the split between men and women—may play a role.

Millennial women’s incomes are much higher than the incomes of women of previous generations, a result of both higher wages and more hours worked. In 2021, Millennial women ages 35 to 44 made roughly twice as much as Boomer women in 1980, and over 20 percent more than Gen X women in 2005. Women 25 to 34 made similar gains.

Men’s incomes, however, have fallen since 1970 (though not nearly as much as women’s have risen). The statistics aren’t uniform: Men on the higher rungs of the economic ladder have for the most part bucked this trend, and Millennial men’s incomes have rebounded from their Great Recession lows. But that may be cold comfort to men making less than their fathers did, especially those who don’t live (and share expenses) with women—even though men still make more than women on average.

These rapidly changing income dynamics also affect Millennial families. For heterosexual couples, if the woman quits her job when children arrive, the family will lose considerably more income than two-earner families did in past generations. If the man quits, the typical family will lose more than half its income. And if both parents keep their job, the couple must find child care—the price of which has far outpaced inflation as more and more parents have sought it. In most states, child care costs more than a year of college at a state university, and sometimes more than housing.

The balancing act between salaries and child care might be one reason Millennials are having fewer children, and also why some Millennials feel they are not doing as well as their parents. In a 2018 poll by The New York Times, 64 percent of young adults who said they expected to have fewer children than their ideal named “child care is too expensive” as the reason.

Still, this argument shouldn’t be taken too far. If Millennials need to spend more income on child care than previous generations did, they also need to spend less on many other things. After accounting for inflation, the prices of cars, clothing, furniture, toys, and electronics have all fallen in recent decades. These are not, for the most part, minor line items in a family budget—or at least they weren’t in, say, the 1980s.

The link between family finances and having kids is also weaker than you might think. On average, families with more income actually have fewer kids; those with less income have more kids. A recent paper by the economists Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue showed that states with bigger increases in child-care costs have not seen steeper declines in birth rates—and found, more broadly, that economic factors were not the major driver of falling birth rates. Instead, they concluded, albeit speculatively, that “shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults”—that is, generational differences in attitudes—are the primary explanation. Hypothetically, the logic goes, Millennials might want more children, but when they trade off kids versus income, professional success, and other goals, kids get slotted lower than in previous generations.

Why Millennials Still Feel Poor

Every generation faces financial challenges, including some that its parents’ generation did not. Within every generation, there is hardship, and Millennials are no different. But all in all, this is a generation on the cusp of middle age that looks successful, not lost. So why does the idea persist that Millennials have gotten screwed economically? Why is the narrative around Millennials still so negative and sometimes angry?

Incomes and wealth are not just objective numbers—there is a large element of perception involved in whether someone thinks they are doing well.

Human beings are hardwired to care deeply about status, and we assess it in two different ways. At any given moment, we look around to see how we’re doing compared with our peers. And we reflect on our own past and future status as well: Are our lives getting better? Are we better off than our parents, and will our children be better off still? Both of these forms of status affect our well-being. A number of factors inherent in modern society may have pushed many Millennials toward a distorted view of each.

Before social media, and before the proliferation of lifestyle and reality TV, the only rich individuals most people encountered were from the particularly well-off families in their town. Now the rich (or at least those who appear to be rich) fill our feeds and our screens, providing a skewed view of how other Americans live. The Kardashians cannot, in fact, be kept up with. Online, everyone else’s life looks more glamorous than our own. The resulting sense of “relative deprivation,” as it’s known among psychologists, no doubt afflicts Americans of all ages—but Millennials have spent their entire adulthood in this milieu, and remain more online than older generations.

Meanwhile, negativity in the news—which, studies show, has become much more pronounced in recent years—has colored perceptions of generational progress. A seemingly endless array of articles and news segments have repeated the idea that Millennials have gotten the shaft economically, an idea that social media amplifies further. (When government economists worry that Millennials might be a “lost generation” as to wealth, it generates news; when they later say that Millennials have greatly narrowed the wealth gap, the coverage is quieter.)

This constant drizzle of grievance and disappointment falls daily on a generation that carried extraordinarily high expectations into adulthood—more than half of Millennials, for example, expected to earn a graduate degree. In a 2011 survey, Millennial teens believed they would make, on average, $150,000 once they settled into their career—more than four times as much as the median income that year. “There is a profound gap between the expectations we were raised to hold and the reality we now experience,” Filipovic writes in OK Boomer. Given those expectations, some Millennials’ disappointment with their status and material success might be baked into the cake.

But expectations do change over time, and perceptions adjust. The Fed’s 2021 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking showed that a small majority of Millennials, 53 percent, believed they were doing better than their parents at the same age. That hasn’t seemed to translate into a more buoyant public discourse, nor to positive views of American capitalism among young adults—in 2021, a Gallup poll showed that nearly half of all 18-to-34-year-olds had a positive view of socialism, compared with only about a third of those older than 55. But it’s encouraging nonetheless.

Whatever one’s views of socialism, it matters whether Millennials are doing better or worse than the generations before them—and, more important, whether they believe they are. The erosion of faith in material progress has already reshaped political values and changed the tenor of American culture, and the longer it persists, the more it will continue to do so. Rising prosperity and the optimism that follows carry benefits that extend well beyond material comfort. They make social comparisons less obsessive and, as the economic historian Benjamin M. Friedman observed in his 2006 book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, create an environment in which hatreds cool, cooperation becomes easier, and human rights advance more readily.

If Millennials keep doing well economically, the optimism that characterized their childhood and adolescence may eventually return. The scars of a searing start can take time to fade, but they eventually might. And if Millennials’ expectations are now lower, they may be pleasantly surprised by their financial success, leading to more contentment in middle age.

Perhaps not long from now, financial pessimism will be talked about as the latest item on the list of things Millennials have killed. That particular murder might be welcome.

This article is adapted from Jean M. Twenge’s book Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—And What They Mean for America’s Future. It appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Myth of the Broke Millennial.”

ChatGPT is revolutionizing work. The AI-powered chatbot, which can write sophisticated responses to just about any prompt and has passed an MBA exam, is holding its own as a coder and is already helping with professional writing. In the few short months since its public launch in 2022, it’s transformed the future of white-collar labor, and provoked an intense debate: Will AI steal our jobs? But during this same period, ChatGPT has also begun quietly shaping work in another, less heralded—but equally influential—realm: the home.

Just as workers have been trying out the software to see how it might make office tasks easier, others have been experimenting with how it might lighten the burdens of unpaid domestic work. Many are using it to plan meals and generate grocery lists. For some it has become an ad hoc family-trip planner and scheduling assistant. Others are testing its ability to budget for a house and make up bedtime stories.

ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI are poised to become a fixture in American homes, similar to other virtual assistants like Alexa. While chatbots could change how certain household tasks get done, it’s less clear whether they could really make a dent in our most persistent domestic challenges: the significant amount of time still spent on chores and the inequality in how that labor is divided.

[Read: Alexa, should we trust you?]

Folks who have started using ChatGPT for their personal to-do lists have found it incredibly useful, especially for one-off tasks. For Raina Kumra, the founder of the company Spicewell and a mother of two in Santa Monica, California, lining up summer camps for her kids each year has been “an entire job.” Many camp options she’s interested in last only one week, so finding enough that didn’t conflict with one another—to cover all of summer vacation—involved making spreadsheets, researching options, and cobbling together a calendar. After all that, she still had to register online, coordinate carpools as needed, find child care for the afternoon if the camp was a half day, and pay all the fees for both of her kids, which could amount to thousands of dollars. This year, she was dreading it. “I turned to AI to help simply out of desperation,” she told me. Within seconds of entering her query, the software generated a comprehensive schedule that (with a few edits) she actually plans to use. It included a good range of activities, from traditional options like sports, art, and nature, to more unexpected choices, such as robotics, cooking, and yoga. This saved her dozens of hours of work, she said.

Unfortunately, there were still dozens of hours of work left to do. Although the AI found the summer camps and made the schedule, it couldn’t complete any of the other steps—including perhaps the biggest one of driving her kids to camp each day. As much as ChatGPT can do, there’s so much it can’t touch. It might share recipes, but it can’t cook meals. It can make a chore chart, but it can’t wash the dishes or take out the trash. Even the steps that it does help with still need oversight. Most people would want to scrutinize a ChatGPT-generated financial plan before implementing it, for example. And despite the clever scheduling it did for Kumra, some of the summer-camp names it gave her were slightly off —she was still able to find them online, but it took more Google sleuthing. Some people who have used the software for family-vacation planning have complained about clichéd suggestions and recommended spots being closed (perhaps because the software has “limited knowledge” of the world after 2021).

In the coming years, many of these kinks will likely be sorted out. But Ekaterina Hertog, the leader of the University of Oxford’s ongoing DomesticAI research project, which is examining what AI has done (and will do) to household labor in the U.K. and Japan, points out that more advanced AI won’t necessarily directly translate to time saved on housework. The introduction of new technology into the home shapes chores in both intentional and unintentional ways. Take washing machines, which seemed like they would easily slash the time people used to spend cleaning clothes by hand. And they did reduce the burden of laundry, but not as much as you might expect, because after their introduction, hygiene standards shot up, and people began to clean their garments more frequently.

[Read: ChatGPT is about to dump more work on everyone]

Hertog suspects that a similar situation could play out with AI. It will likely take practice to learn to write prompts that get the most relevant and helpful responses. And if the software becomes embedded in home life, how much work will it be to teach kids to use it (and to supervise them to make sure they’re doing so safely)? Even more immediately, will having easy access to novel meal plans raise our standards for variety in our diets, leading to more time cooking and shopping?

That second scenario seems to already be playing out for Carole Alalouf, the owner of an animation company who lives in Montreal with her two teens and her husband. Because she has a family of picky eaters—she’s on a Mediterranean diet, her husband is keto, and two of her family members don’t eat pork or shellfish—she cooks the same things over and over, which “drives me bananas,” she told me. ChatGPT instantly gave her some fun new ideas. One of her favorites was Saganaki, a Greek dish featuring fried halloumi cheese, which she has enjoyed at restaurants but never thought to make at home. But though it can spare you from having to search for recipes and make a grocery list, AI-assisted meal planning risks adding some of those hours back in time spent tracking down tough-to-find ingredients or preparing unfamiliar meals more slowly.

If ChatGPT can save even an average of a few minutes a day, that would be significant progress given that on a population level, the time devoted to housework hasn’t meaningfully budged in more than two decades, Melissa Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, told me. Plus, because women do so much more housework than men—moms in heterosexual marriages do 1.7 times as much as their husbands, for example—they also stand to benefit more from any reduction. Kumra thinks “ChatGPT is 100 percent going to help moms with all our unpaid labor,” she told me over email.

But time is only one part of the gendered inequality in domestic work. According to Eve Rodsky, the author of the book Fair Play, a task has three components: The first is conception, or noticing what needs to be done; then comes planning; and then comes execution, or actually doing it. ChatGPT is great for planning and can be useful in execution too. But as of yet, it really doesn’t help with conception. “It will never be able to tell you that your second son needs his adenoids taken out. It will never be able to help with the noticing that your child’s bangs have grown out into their eyes,” Rodsky told me. Noticing and keeping track of everything that needs to be done is “where the mental load really lives.”

One common way of thinking about how domestic labor plays out with many heterosexual couples is that women tend to act as managers and men as helpers, assigned chores by their wives. ChatGPT is perhaps best seen as another helper. It will—sometimes clumsily and sometimes brilliantly—complete the tasks delegated to it, but an AI is no substitute for an equal partner. Rather, it’s merely a reflection of the culture that created it. The software’s occasionally sexist outputs are proof that it sometimes mirrors back our worst impulses. But for couples who work to create a fair distribution of labor in their household, it could also have the potential to mirror back our best intentions. The best-case scenario is for artificial intelligence to become a home helper who reports to two equal managers.

The defamation clash between Fox News and a small election services firm, due to go to trial this week, represents the most significant moment yet in which those who disseminated former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen must answer for conduct that is still poisoning American democracy.