Earlier this year, Willie Nelson was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, having already been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993. Both a living legend and a relatable everyman, Willie turns 90 years old today, and it’s tempting to mark the occasion with yet another retrospective. But the beats and tribulations of his life have already been well covered in a lifetime of magazine profiles and biographies. And anyway, judging by the small library of memoirs he has released, nobody can indulge such retrospection better than the man himself. Rather, reflecting on his journey today, I’m struck by the enduring relevance of a single song: “Funny How Time Slips Away.”

What about this deceptively simple composition—a fairly basic chord structure, three unadorned verses, and no chorus to speak of—makes it so evocative and enduring, so endlessly adaptable across the divides of genre and generation? What does “Funny” reveal not only about the artistry of Willie Nelson, but also about the culture that venerates him?

Since its first recording more than 60 years ago, the song has continued to evolve. After early renditions by Billy Walker, Jimmy Elledge, and Nelson himself in the early 1960s, the song quickly transcended its country roots in the Nashville Sound. An impressive cohort of artists subsequently reinterpreted the song in diverse styles: the too-cool croon of Elvis Presley; the silky groove of Al Green; the easy-listening of Perry Como; the soulful R&B of Dorothy Moore; the Beale Street blues of B. B. King. To such esteemed company, one might also add Stevie Wonder, Norah Jones, Lyle Lovett, The Supremes, The Spinners, Leon Bridges, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and many, many others.

Meanwhile, Willie has offered his own repeated reimaginings. He has performed “Funny” as a lovelorn serenade, a lonesome jazz ditty, an orchestral ballad, a brass-band tune, a blues duet, and more. “Funny How Time Slips Away” has no authoritative, canonical version. This creates a strikingly open field of interpretive possibilities, each of which changes the emotional impact and very meaning of the song.

In essence, “Funny” depicts a jaded narrator running into an old flame. The three verses comprise only one side of the ensuing conversation. With poetic economy, Nelson spins a tale that blends heartbroken earnestness with scathing self-deprecation, sincere nostalgia with tragic pettiness. Decades before Lionel Richie and Adele would execute the same rhetorical maneuver, Nelson begins with an ambiguous greeting: “Well, hello there.” From this first line, the song coaxes listeners in and immediately knocks them off balance. Are we meant to identify with the narrator? Are we the addressee? Or are we eavesdropping on a conversation?

All of this remains unspecified, and so, too, do our sympathies. The narrator dons an air of blasé detachment, as if he had almost, but not quite, forgotten about the former love. Listeners recognize this as a sad pretense, of course, and that tension gives the song its edge. Each verse casts new light (and new shadows) on the characters’ relationship, yet in a way that always remains between the lines. The ruse gradually unravels, revealing a core to the song that is heartbroken and embittered. The narrator’s words are riddled with artifice and contradiction throughout. Take the title and refrain, for instance: The use of funny is clearly euphemistic rather than literal, but a euphemism for what exactly? Depending on the performer, funny can alternately imply any number of reactions to time’s passage: fascination or frustration, consolation or disconsolation, regret or gratitude, wistfulness or outrage.

Or consider the last line: “But remember what I tell you / That in time you’re gonna pay.” Is this a credible threat? A pathetic cry of impotent rage? An ice-breaking joke meant to acknowledge the narrator’s previous, since-worked-through anger? (Indeed, many versions place this line in the past tense—“But remember what I told you”—which clouds the exegetical waters even further.) Semantic elasticity is the song’s secret weapon. Its lyrics are concrete enough to feel real, but hazy enough to justify numerous readings. “Funny” endures precisely because of its capacity to nourish ever-changing emotional landscapes.

Of the countless renditions, my personal favorite is Nelson’s stripped-down live recording from a gathering of country songwriters in 1997 (later released on Ralph Emery’s Country Legends Series Volume 1). It is a softer, more weather-beaten performance, inflected with Nelson’s inimitable jazzy licks and bold chromatic transitions. Embracing his elder-statesman role in American music, Nelson’s performance lays bare the sting of retrospection and transcends the faux detachment of the song’s narrator. In the hands of late-stage artists, one gets a visceral sense of time escaping, adding a meta-textual gravity to a song that is, fundamentally, about the passage of time. Glen Campbell and Dr. John both recorded the song in their twilight years; both recordings were released on their final albums. With age, the titular sentiment evokes something far bigger than lost love—namely, that tangled sense of regret, satisfaction, and melancholy that accompanies getting older.

Like the song, Nelson wears many faces: cowboy and hippie, patriot and renegade, churchgoer and gambler. He is America’s grandpa and the only person to ever out-smoke Snoop Dogg. He is a songwriter of stubborn originality as well as an earnest interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Perhaps nothing distills his genius nor encapsulates his capacious cultural resonance better than “Funny How Time Slips Away.” The song is simultaneously a reliable standard and a musical shape-shifter, just like its songwriter. In short, we love “Funny” for the same reason we love Willie himself: It contains our multitudes and welcomes our contradictions. The brilliance of both lies in their ability to project whatever one most needs to receive. In the song, each can hear their own story. In Willie, each can see their own hero.

The world-renowned children's hospital has "serious" concerns over this weekend's nurses' strike.

Librarians and archivists in Ukraine today are fighting to retain control of the country’s institutional repositories of memory. The bodies of knowledge for which they are responsible are under attack from Russian forces. According to the Ukrainian Library Association, three national and state libraries, including the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine, as well as some 25 university libraries, have been severely damaged or destroyed. The most shocking statistics relate to public libraries: 47 have been completely destroyed beyond repair; another 158 are badly damaged and in need of repair; and a further 276 have received less serious damage.

The toll of ruination includes several buildings of the Karazin University Library in Kharkiv, which held more than 3 million volumes, including many early printed books and manuscripts, as well as important Ukrainian archival collections. In March 2022, a missile exploded in the Rare Book Library, destroying or damaging more than 60,000 precious volumes, and leaving the University Library staff with a daunting task to rescue books damaged by fire, water, and shrapnel. The Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan is among those who have pledged funds to help rebuild the library.

The destruction of libraries was inevitable given such frequent and heavy bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities, but some evidence suggests that Russian forces not only targeted universities, but homed in on their libraries—and deliberately so. The day after the Tarnovsky House and Library for Youth in Chernihiv, northern Ukraine, was hit by Russian ordnance in March last year, the governor, Vyacheslav Chaus, went to inspect the damage and caustically remarked on his Telegram channel, “A stadium and a library. Such strategic objects.” His sarcasm missed the point: The destruction of knowledge and erasure of memory has always been a war aim for those who seek to impose their own version of history on the next generation.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

An even more stark example was the attack in March 2022 on the archives of the State Security Service of Chernihiv Oblast. Tens of thousands of records of Ukrainians, collected by KGB agents during the Soviet era, were destroyed by occupying Russian forces. These archives had been one of the most accessible sources of declassified KGB records from the former Soviet Union. There are also reports of archival documents being seized by Russian occupiers, and that the Russian state archival agency, Rosarkhiv, has been active in occupied territories. Many of these archives contain records of Ukraine’s centralized rule during the Soviet period, including accounts of the oppression and torture of Ukrainian citizens—an uncomfortable story for today’s Kremlin.

Speaking recently from Kyiv, Oksana Bruy, the president of the Ukrainian Library Association, told me, “With the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, new challenges related to this war were added to those that Ukrainian libraries already faced.” She highlighted “the damage and destruction of library buildings, equipment, technology and collections by Russian rockets and bombs. In this context, preserving valuable and rare documents, which are the heritage not only of Ukraine, but of the whole world, is particularly acute.”

In occupied Ukraine, Russian troops are taking books from libraries and ruining them by dumping them in brine. To Bruy, this is a systematic attack on the very idea of Ukraine. “The Russians are destroying Ukrainian historical literature and fiction,” she said. In the district of Kupyansk, in Kharkiv Oblast, the Russian occupying forces ordered all school-library books published after 1991 to be registered and destroyed, even children’s books and fairy tales. They were replaced with officially sanctioned materials brought in from the Russian Federation.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Ukraine formed a distinct part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Documents relating to Ukrainian lands, known as the Ruthenian Metrica, were compiled from original sources and collated into registers in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. As Poland gained regional supremacy over Lithuania in the 1740s, these registers were moved to Warsaw. In 1795, Poland underwent one of its successive partitions, and the registers were seized by Catherine the Great and transported to St. Petersburg.

Following the First World War, the records were returned to Warsaw—except the parts that related to Ukraine, which were torn out of the registers and retained in Moscow. Their presence there came to light only after 1989, when the new policy of openness admitted researchers to the archives. These records could arguably be considered artifacts of Ukraine’s history, of Poland’s, or of Lithuania’s. Clearly, though, they cannot be considered documents of Russian history. The fact that they have remained in Moscow shows Russia’s enduring contempt for the idea of an independent Ukrainian identity.

During the Second World War, the Nazi regime took a close interest in the archives of their enemies. The Reich Security Main Office and an operational unit known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) were tasked with identifying and seizing library and archival collections from across Europe. Those deemed important were sent to Germany; the rest were destroyed.

The ERR took its name from its founder, Alfred Rosenberg, one of the chief architects of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies. He was tried at the Nuremberg trials, and hanged in 1946, for crimes that included the plunder of archives, museums, and private collections. At war’s end, when Soviet forces established control over Central and Eastern Europe, the future of the region’s memory became once again the center of a struggle for political control.

Much of the material looted by the Nazis and discovered at the end of the war was returned to the countries from which it had been seized—more than 3 million books and documents were recovered at the Offenbach Archival Depository outside Frankfurt and restored to their sources by American forces. Records found in Soviet-occupied territory were requisitioned a second time. More than 40 railway wagons carried off millions of books and documents (most of them not originally from Russia) to a massive archival center in Moscow, which is now part of the Russian State Military Archive and notoriously difficult to access.

[George Packer: This is not 1943]

The Russian Federation has followed the U.S.S.R.’s position on seized archive and library collections, either denying their existence or viewing them as reparations for the devastation inflicted by German aggression on the Russian people during the war. The official ideology of the Russian state has altered, but its iron grip on archival material that can be used to dictate an official historical narrative has not changed.

In the post-Soviet era, however, Ukraine has behaved very differently. In 2002, one of Europe’s most important musical archives was returned to its home in Berlin after an absence of more than 50 years, having been presumed lost or destroyed in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Sing-Akademie, founded in 1791 as a choral society, had an outstanding collection of Bach materials, but also manuscript scores by Buxtehude, Froberger, Haydn, Handel, and Mozart.

Originally removed from Berlin in 1943, as the tide of the war turned, the city’s cultural and scientific institutions began to move collections away from the danger brought on by the ever more frequent bombing raids. The Sing-Akademie archive was found by Red Army troops in a Silesian castle in 1945. From there, Soviet authorities moved the collection to the Kyiv Conservatory, where it was secretly housed before being transferred to the Central State Archive–Museum of Literature and Art of the Soviet republic of Ukraine.

Finally, in the 1990s, intrepid researchers tracked down the Sing-Akademie archive’s presence in post-Soviet Kyiv. Three years of diplomacy then followed in order to secure its return to Berlin, against some domestic opposition in Ukraine and severe pressure from Russia. Although Ukraine did not demand any compensatory payment, the German government made a substantial donation to the reconstruction of a church in Kyiv.

The Sing-Akademie archive, now fully available to scholars, has enabled numerous performances, broadcasts, and publications; the renewed access to its materials has enriched world culture. Although not all Ukrainians approved at the time, the return of the archive did play an important part in a process of cultural and political reconciliation, helping Ukraine to become European again.

For many librarians and archivists, the scenes in Ukraine are a catastrophe. For our colleagues there, the uncertainty of whether they will have a building, a collection, staff, or a community to serve are taking a severe emotional toll. Foreign professionals like me have been doing what we can. Along with other cultural-heritage organizations across the U.K., my own institution, the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, along with the university’s museums, sent a truckload of conservation supplies and equipment to Ukraine, and we’ve been encouraged by the images we’ve seen of the crates opened and the supplies put to good purpose. Many international library and archival institutions have been working together to defend Ukraine’s digital space and the electronic-archival collections of its memory institutions from Russian cyber attacks.

“Libraries are currently playing an important role in bringing Ukraine closer to victory,” Lyusyena Shum told me. She runs the organization Library Country Ukraine, which supports libraries across the country. Libraries have become humanitarian and volunteer centers—some helping support displaced persons, others providing aid to the armed forces. “Librarians are the drivers of the struggle on the intellectual front for the brains of Ukrainians,” she said.

We all need them to succeed. Ukraine is fighting a vicious war of extreme violence. But it is also fighting a war of memory and identity. Librarians and archivists are playing a crucial role in the battle for control of the country’s past—for the sake of its future.

Streets across Ukraine are being renamed, and statues of figures like Catherine the Great are toppling down in what officials call "de-Russification” projects.

The small, sickly African girl who arrived in Boston on a seafaring vessel in 1761 had already been stripped of her family and her home. She missed her father, who suffered after having his young child “snatched,” she would later lament in writing. She longed for her mother, whose morning libations to the sun had imprinted on her an enduring memory. She was naked beneath her only physical covering, a “dirty carpet.” She owned nothing, not even herself.

A little over a decade later, this same girl, named Phillis Wheatley after the slave ship that had transported her (the Phillis) and the enslavers who had purchased her (Susanna and John Wheatley), was an author. Her widely read 1773 book of verse, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was striking in its creativity and spoke up for Black humanity. In his erudite, enlightening new biography, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, the historian David Waldstreicher points out that the remarkable and unlikely story of this Revolutionary-era Black celebrity, who was both highlighted and castigated for her race, turns on such reversals and contradictions. Wheatley emerges in these pages as a literary marvel. Waldstreicher’s comprehensive account is a monument to her prowess.

Wheatley was a child prodigy. This is immediately and abundantly clear in Waldstreicher’s treatment and that of others, such as the soaring series of poems about Wheatley written by the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis. Jeffers’s deeply researched work of visionary verse begins with a tribute line by Langston Hughes: “This is a song for the genius child.” Phillis (and it is still painful to refer to her by that slave-ship name) had the kind of nimble mind that seems rare in any time period. Soon after she was brought to the Wheatleys’ fine house on King Street to work as a personal maid to Susanna (who had recently lost her 7-year-old daughter and was likely seeking some sort of replacement in the captive African girl), she showed an interest in the shape of letters and exhibited a hunger for learning. Susanna doted on the child, who was also her servant and property. Either Susanna; her eldest surviving daughter, Mary Wheatley; or both tutored Phillis in the lingua franca of the British empire.

Wheatley became a wordsmith of English—the language that had been used by her captors to catalog and register her, to record her sale on Boston’s shore, to exclude her from inheritance in the Wheatley estate after she had served the family for decades and brought them more glory than they ever would have achieved on their own. Through her mastery of language, her consciousness of political developments, and her astute sense of timing, Wheatley became, as Waldstreicher’s treatment shows, an informal poet laureate of the American Revolutionary age.

The greatest achievement of Waldstreicher’s biography is the portrayal of Wheatley as a serious poet. She wrote elegies for the dead, lyrics of Christian salvation, tributes to great figures, dramas of storms and sea travel, and, charmingly, riddles with political punch lines. She was an artist who seems to have answered an inner drive to create on the page, even as she was compelled to comply with the calls of her owners and members of their social set for poems on specific subjects and to respond to her own savvy sense of who in the Boston and British orbits should be commemorated.

Wheatley was a student who read classic works of European literature, from the ancient verse of Homer to the early-modern writings of Alexander Pope. She was a craftsperson who selected her subjects, attended to form, traded in classical references and literary allusions, and engaged in wordplay and ironic misdirection. She was a political commentator who saw words and ideas as battlegrounds for the high-stakes issues of her day. And she never forgot her African family or abandoned the cause of Black freedom. Wheatley wrote from her whole experience, out of fractured memory, and with a compassionate heart, asserting with every stroke of her quill that she was a thinking, feeling, political subject who should not be enslaved.

[Read: Eight books that reevaluate American history]

But Wheatley made this daring assertion about herself and her race at a time when the sale and purchase of Black people was a bustling trade in Boston, when Black intellectual incompetence was assumed, when an escalating crisis between the American colonies and Great Britain heightened debate about the future status of slavery itself. As an owned person belonging to a subjugated racial caste who had to please her captor-benefactors, the poet Wheatley faced an impossible task. Waldstreicher teases out these tangled threads and more, demonstrating Wheatley’s constrained position and how, from that tight spot, she waged ideological and political warfare with her words. “Writing is fighting by other means,” Waldstreicher contends. And Wheatley, Boston’s well-armed bard, was “a patriot poet and a political subject of Britain and New England.”

The version of Wheatley that Waldstreicher paints is the one I’ve always wished I’d known. What Black student (especially if she aspires to be a writer) can forget the first encounter with Wheatley’s famous (or infamous) poem, “On Being Brought From Africa to America”? I met this poem during college in a challenging African American–literature survey course, in which our lectures emphasized the complexity of African American subjectivities and the double-voiced discourses of the Black literary tradition. Nevertheless, I cringed when reading it silently to myself in a dorm room, and again when hearing it read aloud, the words echoing through the lecture hall. “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too, ” Wheatley had professed. I pleaded with Wheatley, the first African American to publish a book and one of the first North American women to publish a book of poetry: Certainly, you could not mean you were glad to be enslaved. Surely, you must not mean that slavery was a saving grace. Wheatley did not answer, so I argued with myself as I parsed her line describing “Negros, black as Cain.” This cannot be right. This cannot be all. This cannot be. Something was amiss beneath the surface of her seemingly placid poem, but it was hard for me to pinpoint what or where, to name the mechanics of literary resistance.

As a senior historian of early America with a love of poetry (which runs in the family, according to the book’s acknowledgments) Waldstreicher possesses the right tool kit for disassembling Wheatley’s words. He argues with absolute and convincing confidence that Wheatley harbored a political as well as poetical will, which she directed toward securing her survival, her emancipation, and the freedom of what she called her “sable” race—even as she came to side with the imperfect American colonies against Great Britain. Hers was political poetry. She successfully navigated her social context, in which one wrong move, one misplaced word, could lead to the withdrawal of her owners’ support for her writing, or even to her sale. She wielded her words with exacting control out of necessity. Many of Wheatley’s phrases and lines that seem disparaging of Africa or Black people can be read as sarcastic or sardonic, Waldstreicher shows, especially when placed beside her other writings, such as letters to friends and associates of color—like the enslaved woman Obour Tanner and the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom—and rediscovered poems.

Through close readings of Wheatley’s known work and an astonishing retrieval of several poems published anonymously (which Waldstreicher acknowledges may or may not have been written by Wheatley), Waldstreicher slowly unveils the person behind the pen. I needed to dust off my metaphorical handbook of literary terms to follow Waldstreicher’s references, but the effort was worth it. He seems to have done the same while reading Wheatley in order to catalog and address an array of classical and early-modern figures she references, ancient gods and goddesses she names, and lyrical formulations she adopts.

While tracing Wheatley’s evolution as a poet, Waldstreicher also explains why her writing has been devalued over time. Many modern readers find the rhyming-couplet form (one of Wheatley’s favorites) trite and simplistic, when this was an appreciated type of verse in Wheatley’s time. Beyond this, poetry overall has ceased to be the dominant form of private and public expression that it once was. As Waldstreicher puts it, poems of the late 18th century were like the tweets of today: omnipresent, constrained by form (rhythmic schemes then, 280 characters now), part of public culture. His painstaking interpretations equal Wheatley’s own intentional verse, making it a joy to follow along as he unpacks her words and their arrangement, instructing us to read a line of Wheatley’s and then read it again with an eye roll to see how the meaning changes. When Wheatley writes about race, Waldstreicher shows, she is often mocking a racist or hypocritical point of view that she personally disavows.

If The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley is principally a literary biography, it is simultaneously and forcefully a political history of race and slavery in Revolutionary-era America. It is full of illuminating and specific insights about how slavery figured into colonial politics and how individual Black people played significant roles in events as they unfolded. Waldstreicher routinely points out the “countervailing trends” in Boston and New England that indicated both a weakening and strengthening of the rationale for and practice of slavery as the political winds changed. He compares the “stranger” status of outcast enslaved people in Boston to that of the reviled British soldiers sent to occupy the city. He highlights the ways that patriot leaders began to assume Black collusion with the British and projected fears about a Black fifth column that made Black residents more vulnerable. He notices that the street soldiers of Boston’s defense during the siege, those who taunted British soldiers and caused public ruckuses, were young people of Wheatley’s generation, and that age was a demographic factor that meaningfully intersected with race and class—young people in general being more willing to openly resist colonial rule. In showing how deeply enmeshed Wheatley was with Boston, Waldstreicher also illustrates how tightly woven the story of American liberty and Black American slavery truly were.

Slavery informed Americans’ understanding of the meaning of freedom. The fact of Black captivity at the hands of American colonists made the British threat of unfettered control seem all too real, even as their subjugation of Black people weakened the patriots’ argument in defense of liberty. American freedom and Black slavery were bound together. And, as Waldstreicher shows, Black patriots like Wheatley, who was both African and American, knew this to be the case.

Wheatley observed and recorded in verse the great swirl of events in the Revolutionary hub that was Boston. She wrote poems about youth killed in the Boston streets, fallen patriot soldiers, British naval commanders, and George Washington. She wrote a poem titled “America,” and if Waldstreicher’s attribution of an exciting unsigned work is correct, she wrote a poem about the Boston Massacre and therein named Crispus Attucks, the Afro-Native man who was the first to fall in the conflict. She commented with sophistication on the occurrences of her times and somehow managed to fold in rhyme. After the publication of her book and a visit to London, Wheatley gained her freedom.

[Read: A view of American history that leads to one conclusion]

By the time Waldstreicher recounts Thomas Jefferson’s snide attack on Wheatley in Notes on the State of Virginia (she died before its publication), he has shaped a biography that makes Wheatley’s gifts clear and Jefferson’s desperation palpable. Jefferson was a slaveholder who recognized the practice as a moral wrong and yet needed to justify chattel slavery and Black exclusion by asserting racial inferiority. When Jefferson besmirched Wheatley by saying she lacked originality of thought and was merely an imitator of others as evidence of his inferiority theory, he was being disingenuous. Or perhaps Wheatley’s sly insertion of penetrating insights in seemingly accommodating verse went over Jefferson’s head, as it has so many of ours.

Like that of other Black geniuses in earlier eras, Wheatley’s life was no crystal stair. When John Wheatley died in 1778, he left her nothing. Her most valuable piece of property was the book she had written. Soon after, she married a free Black merchant and took his name, becoming Phillis Wheatley Peters. The couple seem to have had at least one child; they then fell into debt and poverty. Wheatley may have died in a boardinghouse alone. Even as he retells this last phase of Wheatley’s life, Waldstreicher warns that this tragic version of events, which comes mostly from the white Wheatley family line, is far from complete.

The same cannot be said for The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. This book does the complexity of Wheatley’s life and work justice. But while thorough, the narrative is not immersive in the way of some other historical biographies swimming in setting and character sketches. One never feels as though the texture and verve of 18th-century Boston are fully captured. Waldstreicher speaks, at times, with a utilitarian directness that may have stemmed from a desire to write accessibly, especially as a means of balancing out the thick passages of literary criticism. Sometimes this leads him to turns of phrase that diminish the gravity of his subject matter, such as his indelicate suggestion that children like Wheatley were “pawned” by their African parents, his reference to “Boston-baked slavery” (which brings to mind baked beans), and his comment that Wheatley seems to (but does not) throw Africa “under the proverbial bus.”

There is, besides these minor slippages, another instance that seems askew. Although Waldstreicher spends hundreds of pages meticulously portraying Wheatley in the richness of her context and tracing the intricacies of her intellectual contemporaries and antecedents, he chooses not to do the same for his own predecessors and interlocutors. It is possible to read this book without realizing that the author is building on the work of others, as all scholarship does. Only at the very end, nearly on the final page, do readers learn any real detail about the generations of Black clubwomen and Black women writers, and about the modern-day Black poets, whose revival of Wheatley’s legacy and engagement with her poetry made Waldstreicher’s investigation possible. Given that this book is about the historical importance, impact, and dismissal of Black talent, the editorial decision to drop these names in at the end is disappointing.

Still, Waldstreicher has done more than his part. There can now be no doubt of Wheatley’s importance not only to African America but also to the country and culture as a whole. She was a learned, dexterous wielder of the written word in a taut political and racial moment. “Hers is an African diaspora story, a British story, a New England story, and an American story,” Waldstreicher writes. With patient skill, Waldstreicher demonstrates what we should have seen all along. Wheatley is among the greatest thinkers of her age, and her writing should join the American canon of Revolutionary literature alongside the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the rest, as a testament to the entwined contestations of that consequential era.

As soon as my kids were born, I began reading to them. They’d gurgle up at me, chewing their adorable fingers, as I chanted the words to The Real Mother Goose or When We Were Very Young. I’d loved books as a child, and I couldn’t wait to share my favorites with my new little family.

Once they could read, however, my boys made clear to me that we didn’t enjoy the same stories. Neither of them had much interest in the fairy tales I loved, and I couldn’t stand most of what they checked out of the library—I struggled to follow their graphic novels and cringed at dense World War I nonfiction, full of descriptions of gory battles and trench foot.

Even so, I was grateful for the time we spent with our books, and loved what it did for us as a family. Sharing what we were reading could give us a common language and a cast of characters we all knew. But how was I to find writing that might entertain everyone? That was the wrong question, I realized. Any given selection was unlikely to thrill the entire group, but a book can do more than entertain—it can also provoke, challenge, educate, or soothe.

What I list here, then, is an assortment of titles that may speak to a wide array of ages and tastes. Will everyone in your family enjoy these the same way? Honestly, that seems unlikely. But each will offer something significant to a variety of readers, in any stage of life.

Yearling

Toys Go Out, by Emily Jenkins

I associate reading together with snuggling at bedtime, when you choose a book that’s comforting enough to bring everyone sweet dreams. And when I consider that experience, Toys Go Out comes immediately to mind. On the surface, it’s a simple story that follows a collection of sentient toys named Stingray (a stingray), Lumphy (a buffalo), and Plastic (we’re not quite sure what Plastic is; that’s a mystery), and the episodic adventures they share in their bedroom. Periodically, they venture beyond its threshold—one excursion involves a human-mandated visit to Frank, the “bumpity washing machine,” who isn’t nearly as scary as Lumphy fears—and every chapter stirs up curiosity and joy. Toys Go Out is gentle enough for a toddler but clever enough to snare a slightly older kid pretending not to listen. And it’s so quietly philosophical about relationships, communication, and the idea of home that I often went to bed still pondering what I’d just read.

Oxford University Press

The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, edited by Neil Philip

The gift I most frequently send to any new parent is a thick anthology of poems, such as The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. People are sometimes surprised when they unwrap it, but I never worry, as most kids have an innate love of meter and rhyme; they’re delighted by the daily poetry of cheers and preschool chants. A volume like this one, packed with a wide range of styles and voices, offers something for everyone. Take turns dipping in, and each family member can find poems they’ll relish, whether they respond more to the playfulness of Lewis Carroll or the thoughtful reflections of Langston Hughes. And because poetry has a habit of sticking in the brain, the most satisfying payoff may come years or even decades later: Recently, my now-teenage son posted a few lines of W. B. Yeats on Instagram, and although he may not recall where he first heard the poem, I have fond memories of reading it to him from a big collection just like this one.

[Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading]

Crown

The Cartoon History of the Universe, Volumes 1–7, by Larry Gonick

The Cartoon History of the Universe has probably affected our household more than any other series, though I’m not even sure where our copies came from. The cover promises everything from “the Big Bang to Alexander the Great,” and the first installment is the right place to start. It has a pleasingly wacky premise: A Harvard mathematician loses his temper and quits to build a time machine in his library, powered by the smell of musty books. Life evolves quickly in his cartoon land, and fairly soon humans get straight to work developing cities, armies, and deities. From there, Gonick’s panels run slapdash through geography, art, economics, and faith, combining ridiculous onomatopoeias like “Crakarumblebwooom!” with silly puns, physical humor, and social critique. Each chapter is devoted to a single topic, and they’re organized in a loosely chronological fashion, so you can flip to whatever subjects your family is most likely to enjoy. Part of what made Cartoon History so special to us was that my kids read them first, then found themselves experts in all sorts of subjects I knew nothing about. I’d marvel at their sudden knowledge of Pythagoras or the gigantic mammals of the Eocene epoch—and steal the books as soon as they were finished.

Candlewick Press

Journey, by Aaron Becker

A certain kind of book is well suited to life in the back seat of a car. It has pictures, can be read out of order or paused abruptly when you arrive somewhere, and stands up to repetition. It’s typically purchased for children but can also entertain grown-ups in traffic jams. And Journey is the ultimate car book: It’s the wordless expedition of a bored girl who takes a magical red crayon and, like Harold, draws a universe of her own devising. She escapes into a land of glowing lanterns, primeval forests, hot-air balloons, castles, and flying carpets. It’s a wild, breathless adventure; the visual complexity, which can make you feel like you’re staring at architectural drawings, is dizzying. Readers may spend long stretches simply gazing at a single spread, searching for anything they may have missed the last time. Journey leaves so much to the imagination that, in essence, everyone becomes a storyteller the minute they open it.

[Read: What rereading childhood books teaches adults about themselves]

First Second

This One Summer, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

This One Summer is one of the rare books perfect for middle schoolers, who are often caught in the gap between childhood stories and more self-reflective teen narratives. The Tamakis’ graphic novel follows adolescent Rose as she spends one important season at a lake house her family visits annually. This year, things feel different. Rose’s parents are fighting; meanwhile, she becomes privy to the activities of older teens in the area, who face complex challenges like pregnancy and mental illness. As readers look on, Rose struggles to understand the rapidly changing universe around her, and eventually finds a way to accept her place in it. The plot is so much like real life, it’s almost painful—but it’s a deeply honest depiction of adolescence, and it might help provide families with a basis for difficult-to-navigate conversations. Kids absorb and puzzle over so much about the adult world, and This One Summer acknowledges that brilliantly.

Nancy Paulsen Books

Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson

“Somewhere in my brain / each laugh, tear and lullaby / becomes memory,” Woodson tells us, in “how to listen #1,” an early selection from her memoir-in-poems. Brown Girl Dreaming is full of these kinds of memories—instants tied together carefully so that we feel as though we know the speaker intimately. The book uses Woodson’s deeply personal recollections, and her family lore, to examine the crossroads of America’s recent past: Her story begins in Ohio in 1963, but it moves in and out of time and space, exploring her moves to segregated South Carolina and bustling New York City as well as the histories and political landscapes of these places. The musical, precise verse moves quickly from moment to moment, and is especially tender in portraying the inner life of young Jackie. The way the distinct, quotidian details of Woodson’s biography are woven into the decades reminds the reader that each day, we are all living through history.

[Read: How to show kids the joy of reading]

Harper Perennial

Collected Poems, by Allen Ginsberg

“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing,” Ginsberg writes at the beginning of his celebrated poem “America,” which I first read when I was 14 years old. It baffled me. Did I like it? I wasn’t sure. But it drove me to the encyclopedia, where I’d look up the terms I’d never heard before. (What were “Wobblies”? Who was Vanzetti?) Even though I didn’t understand everything, I was captivated by the relentless force of Ginsberg’s language, his conviction and rage. His work sounded a lot like how I felt at that age—messy, self-righteous, confused. Encountering “America” now, I feel the same way I did 35 years ago. While a family may need a bedtime book for drifting off, they may also need one for waking up, and Ginsberg, the eternal writer of friction, is the perfect poet to struggle with. In these complicated times, he seems like the right poet for the young and the old to share, whether you discuss the challenges in “Howl”’s cry for the marginalized or the personal grief of “Kaddish.” All these years after I first read them, these poems still shock me, and they may well send new readers off to see what else poetry can do.

ChatGPT, the chatbot designed by the San Francisco–based company OpenAI, has elicited excitement, some unease, and much wonderment around the world. In China, though, the U.S. bot and the artificial intelligence that makes it work represent a threat to the country’s political system and global ambitions. This is because chatbots such as ChatGPT revel in information—something the Chinese state insists on controlling.

The Chinese Communist Party keeps itself in power through censorship, and under its domineering leader, Xi Jinping, that effort has intensified in a quest for greater ideological conformity. Chatbots are especially tricky to censor. What they blurt out can be unpredictable, and when it comes to micromanaging what the Chinese public knows, reads, and shares, the authorities don’t like surprises.

Yet this political imperative collides with the country’s urgent and essential need for innovation, especially in areas such as AI and chatbots. Without continuing technological advances, China’s economic miracle could stall and undercut Xi’s aim of overtaking the United States as the world’s premier superpower. Xi is as intent on his campaign for technological progress as he is on his drive for stricter social control. The development of AI is a crucial pillar of that program, and ChatGPT has exposed how China’s tech sector still lags behind that of its chief geopolitical rival, the U.S.

“The Chinese government is very torn” on chatbots, Matt Sheehan, a fellow who focuses on global technology at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “Ideological control, information control, is one of, if not the, top priority of the Chinese government. But they’ve also made leadership in AI and other emerging technologies a top priority.” Chatbots, he said, are “where these two things start to come into conflict.”

Which path Xi chooses could have huge consequences for China’s competitiveness in technology. Will he permit the progress that can propel China to dominance in the global economy? Or will he sacrifice the cause of innovation to his desire to maintain his grip on Chinese society?

[Annie Lowrey: How ChatGPT will destabilize white-collar work]

Those who live in open societies tend to believe that free thinking and the free flow of information are indispensable prerequisites for innovation. A corollary of this view is that a political system such as China’s, which stifles intellectual curiosity and enforces social conformity, discourages the creativity and risk-taking necessary for achieving breakthroughs. In some respects, that argument has merit. There is no Chinese Disney, for instance, and there may never be as long as the state restricts the freedom of filmmakers to tell stories and create characters. Pop culture across Asia is dominated by what the democratic societies of Japan and South Korea produce.

China’s authoritarianism already inhibits its tech sector in other ways. The Chinese video-swapping app TikTok is facing a possible ban or forced sale in the U.S. because of fears that its Beijing-headquartered parent company, ByteDance, could be pressured to give up private data on American citizens to China’s security state.

Chinese leaders do not believe innovation requires individual liberties innovation and see no contradiction between political control and high-tech aspiration. Communist autocracy has not prevented Chinese companies from emerging as leaders in sectors such as 5G telecommunications networks or electric vehicles. Nor has censorship impeded the development of technologies in the politically riskier realm of data and content. China has vibrant and inventive industries in gaming and social media.

In addition, far from suppressing potentially disruptive and subversive AI technology, the state has actively supported it. In 2017, the State Council, the country’s top governing body, released a national strategy for the sector called the “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” with the goal of “making China the world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030. In his report to October’s important Communist Party congress, Xi specifically mentioned AI as one of the “new growth engines” that the country must cultivate.

Despite this high-level attention, China’s AI sector lags behind America’s—at least in the area of chatbots, as ChatGPT made all too obvious. In China, “the government, tech entrepreneurs, and investors understand how incredible ChatGPT is and they don’t want to be left behind,” Jordan Schneider, a senior analyst with the research firm Rhodium Group, told me. “To sort of be upstaged so dramatically by OpenAI and ChatGPT was a little embarrassing and is something that is certainly going to focus minds and companies and talent around closing that gap.”

The deficit appears significant. In March, Robin Li, the founder of the Chinese internet-search firm Baidu, tried to show off his own ERNIE Bot, but the demonstration—which used prerecorded results—was so disappointing that the company’s share price plunged on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

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

Left to themselves, the talented engineers and coders at Baidu and other Chinese AI labs will likely catch up. But the state is certain to interfere. Whatever chatbots the tech firms create will have to abide by the same restrictions on speech that China’s human residents are compelled to follow. That was made clear this month when the country’s cybersecurity watchdog issued new draft regulations for the AI sector that require chatbots to produce content in line with socialist values and not liable to subvert state power—broad categories indeed.

The government imposes such censorship on the digital world with the same blunt force it applies to the real world. An army of scrupulous censors scrub politically sensitive material from social-media platforms. Many foreign media and internet services are blocked by the Great Firewall, the digital fortification erected by the state to keep out unwanted information and ideas. Internet searches are restricted. Authorities have taken steps to prevent Chinese citizens from using ChatGPT. Regulators reportedly ordered Chinese tech firms to deny their users access.

Otherwise, ChatGPT will produce politically unacceptable—if, in all likelihood, truthful—information on such topics as Beijing’s mistreatment of the minority Uyghur community, which the state doesn’t want the Chinese public to see. The China Daily, a news outlet owned by the Chinese government, warned that ChatGPT can “boost propaganda campaigns launched by the U.S.”

Baidu’s ERNIE, available to the public on a limited basis only, simply refuses to respond to some politically suspect queries and tries instead to change the subject. (I requested access to ERNIE for this article, but have not been granted it.)

How Baidu and other chatbot providers adjust their models to adhere to the state’s censorship rules could have further negative effects. For instance, a chatbot model trained only on vetted information encircled by China’s Great Firewall is unlikely to be as effective as a foreign competitor that draws on a wider and more diverse corpus of sources. (In a recent press release, Baidu noted that ERNIE had been trained on “a knowledge graph of 550 billion facts” and other material, but when I asked for further details of the sources, the company would not comment.)

Chatbots are also potentially more difficult to censor than earlier forms of digital media. Chatbot models will analyze, collate, and connect data in unexpected and surprising ways. “The best analogy would be to how a human learns,” Jeffrey Ding, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies Chinese technology, explained to me. “Even if you are learning things from only a censored set of books, the interactions between all those different books you are reading might produce either flawed information or politically sensitive information.”

That presents special challenges to Chinese AI specialists and state censors. Even if a Chinese chatbot is trained on a limited set of politically acceptable information, it can’t be guaranteed to generate politically acceptable outcomes. Furthermore, chatbots can be “tricked” by determined users into revealing dangerous information or stating things they have been trained not to say, a phenomenon that has already occurred with ChatGPT.

This unpredictability places China’s tech sector in an unenviable position. On the one hand, researchers are under pressure to achieve breakthroughs in AI and meet the government’s targets. On the other, designing chatbots could be dangerous in a political environment that tolerates no dissent. The authorities are unlikely to look kindly on a chatbot that breaks the rules—or on the entrepreneurs and engineers designing and training it. To drive that point home, the draft regulations from the cybersecurity agency hold chatbot providers responsible for the content they produce. That alone could discourage China’s tech elite from pursuing chatbots, or at least advanced models of them that would be available to the public.

[Read: The electric-car lesson China is serving up for America]

Fettering chatbots with too many constraints, however, could imperil China’s progress, as well as inhibit developments in the crucial science behind them. “Chatbots are not just a funny toy,” Sheehan, from the Carnegie Endowment, told me. “A lot of people in the deep tech of AI think this is the most promising path forward for creating more general artificial intelligence, which is kind of the holy grail of the field.” Therefore, “Chinese officials are at cross purposes on this one.”

Much will depend on what China’s leaders are willing to let slide in the name of experimentation. There are good reasons to believe they will allow some latitude. The explosion of social media in China has also posed risks to the state, as it offers Chinese citizens the power to widely share unauthorized information—videos of protests, for instance—faster than censors can suppress it. Yet the authorities have accepted this downside in order to allow new technologies to flourish.

“I do think the Chinese government is concerned about the negative, harmful effects of AI,” Ding told me. Despite “the censorship,” he added, “we’ve seen from the past track record of Chinese companies and the Chinese government that there is a way forward with respect to creating breakthrough innovations in this space.”

The Chinese government could even find ways to use chatbots to its advantage. Just as the authorities have been able to co-opt social media and employ the platforms to manipulate popular opinion, monitor the public, and track dissenters, so could a chatbot easily become a tool of social control, promoting official narratives and principles. In their recent book, Surveillance State, the journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin write that China’s rulers believe that becoming a leader in such technologies as AI “would help the Party build a new system of control that would ensure its own well-being.”

Such an obedient, party-line chatbot—shielded from more formidable, uncensored foreign competitors behind the Great Firewall—could succeed perfectly well within China yet have little appeal outside. In that case, what China’s authoritarianism will inhibit is not technological advancement per se, but its technological competitiveness in the wider world.

“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.”

Great Britain miss out on the Billie Jean King Cup Finals after Harriet Dart's loss to France's world number five Caroline Garcia.

Great Britain's Katie Boulter is close a major upset before world number five Caroline Garcia puts France ahead in the Billie Jean King Cup.