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 what they experience or observe personally that is most at odds with what they see portrayed in the media.

G. is a 77-year-old woman:

I’m not seeing the real me. I wish the entertainment media would tell the truth about people like me who are my age. I don’t wear (or own) an apron. I’m perfectly comfortable with technology. I taught my 20-year-old granddaughter how to populate a website.

Don’t let looks fool you. I am a sexual person. I love my family but value my privacy and independence. Managing that space is harder than you think. The never-ending display of face lifts and rejuvenation products is a mean-spirited denial of the real beauty of age.

G.Y. offers an analogy:

I am a southerner—from the deepest of the deep South. We southerners don’t hear our own accent, just as my New England friends don’t hear their accents. It takes an outsider to hear and point out the sonic nuances that we never notice in ourselves. And if the accent is to be portrayed—by a stage actor, for example—it requires a farcical overexaggerated caricature to portray the accent in a universally recognizable way.

This is the problem with our political discourse and how it is reported on by perfectly good and conscientious journalists. None of us are capable of hearing our own ideological accents, but they are glaringly obvious to the rest of the world. All of our assumptions are assumed and so we imagine them to be conventional wisdom. And you just can’t edit out your ideological accent when you are immersed in it any more than you could dry yourself off while swimming in a lake.

All of our [national] media outlets are located on the coast, as is the entertainment industry, as is our seat of federal governance, and so they are all immersed in one particular ideological accent. Not only do they not hear it, but they also can’t possibly hear it, nor should we expect them to. It can only be pointed out by an observant outsider and can only be illustrated or portrayed by outsiders with a sort of exaggerated vaudeville act—oversimplifying and overemphasizing small, nuanced tones and tenors.  Think, for example, the exaggerated and overheated Kabuki theater of political talk radio.

In the past, before the advent of internet and instant posting, the reporters lived in the same ideologically accented bubble, but if you wanted your story to be picked up off the wire in Topeka, or Racine, or Little Rock, or any town in Middle America, you had to get the attention of the local editor that was conversant in the local vernacular. If the local editor in Topeka did not pick up the story, it did not get read in Topeka. Now the newsrooms are populated by Ivy League–credentialed elites, just a younger version of the editors. And so again we miss the vital opportunity for writing in the vernacular of the nation rather than our own particular provincial perspective. After all, New York and Washington, D.C., are easily the two most provincial towns in America. The most obvious solution is to disperse our reporters to the hinterlands, but will any of them be willing to trade Manhattan for Racine?

Eric harkens back to pandemic coverage:

I take umbrage with the portrayal of essential workers by media organizations. As someone who has worked at grocery stores throughout the pandemic, I felt as if the media treated essential workers as a strange curiosity who do not consume media themselves. The use of the royal we in phrases like “We’ve all been at home the past few years” became so ubiquitous as to go unquestioned. Actually, many of us went out into the world on a daily basis. There were so many articles talking about the difficulties of isolation or cohabitating during the pandemic. But I could find none that addressed the struggle of an essential worker living with someone who never left the house.

Jaleelah sees a lot more hand-wringing about the unwillingness of young people to debate than she does real-world support for them to do it:

The biggest threat to debate on campus does come from administrators, but in an indirect manner: Debate clubs in Canada often receive little to no funding from their universities. Hundreds of curious students seek out my debate team, but since the university I attend started charging all clubs $100 per room booking (after 10 or so freebies), we don’t have the space for all of them to speak. Dozens of students who practice constructing and delivering arguments for weeks or months express interest in debating students from other schools. But since there’s some obscure rule against funding off-campus events, we can only send a handful of them to competitions. With so many prominent conservatives publicly lamenting the decline of debate, one might assume that sponsors are jumping to support the activity. That is sadly not the case.

Kimberly is glad that people who are obese are now portrayed in media and that fat-shaming is being challenged, but believes that almost all such portrayals are leaving out the health challenges of obesity:

I have three very good friends who are obese and they all suffer with diabetes and decreased mobility. All have had knee replacements and two have serious respiratory issues. On television, all that you see is fat and happy, with good health insinuated, whereas in reality that is often not the case.

Earl believes that “much of the media have a less-than-adult portrayal of religion in the lives of Americans.”

He writes:

The writer/reporter who admits to having been “raised Lutheran” or otherwise concluded their religious participation before finishing high school nevertheless will write or report on religion as if everyone has the same, often two-dimensional, perspective on a part of the human experience that has been around since humans were invented. When religious beliefs, dogma, and practices conflict with hot-topic issues in the secular, popular culture, the media usually make no effort to probe into the religious basis of such matters.

Media that pride themselves on accurate and in-depth reporting have knowledge of the U.S. political system and its history well beyond high-school courses. When writing and reporting on religious affairs, they need to educate themselves to a level commensurate with the topics at hand.

Leela opines on media portrayals of Asian Americans:

As a mixed-race Jewish teenage girl, I’ve never been able to find a piece of modern media that quite encapsulates my life. However, one of the biggest discrepancies between my life and the media is the current portrayal of “Asian stories.” I’m half South Asian, and nearly every time I see a movie or television show in the United States that claims to be capturing the “Asian experience,” it’s actually just about East Asians. Always Be My Maybe, Crazy Rich Asians, Fresh Off the Boat, Shang-Chi, Beef, Minari, and more films and shows that I’m encouraged to watch because they “capture what it’s like to be an Asian American” don’t have a single person who looks like me. I 100 percent believe that the stories told in these movies and television shows are important, and I don’t feel like South, Southeast, or Central Asians should have been randomly inserted into them. But just for once, I’d like to see a movie about the Asian experience that lives up to its marketing by actually including characters from more than one region of Asia.

Based on the majority of TV shows and movies that are promoted as “telling Asian stories,” you’d think Asia was only made up of China, Japan, Korea, and sometimes Vietnam. This impacts how Asian Americans like me, whose families don’t come from those countries, are treated. Even the action of casually referring to myself as Asian has led to me needing to open Google Maps to show others that India is in Asia, to “prove” why I can identify that way, and I have never felt comfortable joining organizations such as my school’s Asian Student Union because I feel as though I’m not the type of Asian that it was created for.

I also feel as though the media’s limited idea of who gets to be Asian American has impacted their reporting on hate crimes. When South Asians and Middle Eastern people (many of whom are also Asian) are targeted as “terrorists,” it should also be an issue that the Asian American community and their allies rally together and raise awareness about, just like we showed up to protest the attacks on East and Southeast Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can’t explain how amazing it was to watch Never Have I Ever and see it front and center on Netflix’s recommended shows during AAPI heritage month. Seeing characters who look like me and my family on a show that was included in a list of media about the “Asian experience,” a marketing tagline which used to only reaffirm my sense of not belonging in the Asian community, makes me smile every time I rewatch it. I hope that in the future, movies and television shows will start to get made that showcase the full range of diverse stories and experiences within the Asian diaspora.

Matthew opines on homeownership:

This will come as a very heterodox viewpoint to the narrative of my generation, but I disagree with the portrayal of home ownership as out of reach for most Americans. My partner and I were making less than $100K combined a year when we bought our home in Dallas. We had been renters our whole lives (mid-30s at the time) and lived in central Dallas in an affordable apartment in a VERY expensive area. Rents kept climbing but we knew we wanted to buy. We eventually looked at much more affordable homes in a slowly gentrifying area that was within five miles of downtown. We paid $225K for our home in 2016 and found our mortgage payment to be less than rent for many of our friends.

Our home needed lots of work. (Still does!!) It’s vintage 1969. No granite countertops, some really ugly carpet and wallpaper, but it’s our project. We’ve been doing bit by bit to make it better. When I hear so many people complain about the affordability of homes, I can’t help but think, “Of course you can’t afford to live where you rent right now!” The narrative that we’re being told is that you should be able to buy a house convenient to the best places in town. It’s not realistic! There are affordable houses available, they just aren’t where you want to live. You might have to sacrifice convenience, location, and amenities.

I realize that there are cities and places that are ABSOLUTELY too expensive and have terrible policies that have made homeownership a real struggle. I am really fortunate to have a good job and was able to afford the many surprise costs of buying a home. But, to constantly reinforce to a whole generation that they CANNOT afford to own a home doesn’t mesh with reality. That dream is possible with adjusting expectations and potentially looking outside your comfort zone.

John believes there is a negativity bias built into media:

The biggest difference between my personal observations and the media’s reported news is just how amazingly good everything really is in our country. Whether you are watching Fox News or reading The Washington Post, you might get the impression that things are very, very bad in America. They aren’t. While there are plenty of negative things to report on, unemployment is low, goods are plentiful, and people have discretionary money to spend.

Typical news quote: “Our country is divided as ever.” No, not really. And if the media wasn’t complicit in the politicians’ efforts to divide us into neat groups, we would be less divided. I have all types on my boat for fishing trips and all are welcome. Trump superfans to LGBTQ, we all have a lot in common, and in my experience, all you have to do to get along with most anyone is be polite and friendly (and maybe avoid political discussions).

But it really is more than that. Our country, somehow, is still behind some of the greatest innovations the world has seen. And our country keeps innovating, and it makes the world a better place. IT devices are reliable and capable in a way that even 10 years ago would’ve seemed impossible. Health care has advances that are simply amazing, helping people not just live longer, but live better lives. This list could just go on and on. What is often lacking, especially from TV media, is context. My spouse and I watch the evening news every day, and she often says, “I needed one more sentence.” Instead of getting that additional context, we get the next sensationalized outrage bait.

Dan and Vicky are curious about the explanation for a demographic shift:

What we see in the media that conflicts with our professional and personal experiences: The apparent frequency of transgenderism—i.e., individuals whose identities conflict with their biological sex. We are in our mid-70s. As children, one of us remembers Christine Jorgensen. That’s it in terms of individuals who are transgender. We had no knowledge of anyone in elementary school, high school, college, or graduate school who seemed to identify as a different gender than their biological sex.

In the ’70s one of us became a police officer, and spent her entire career in law enforcement. She was one of a group of five women who were admitted to the police academy in Seattle. She worked as a patrol officer, in corrections, setting up a marshals service for a county in Washington, as an advocate for abused women going through the court system, and as a juvenile probation counselor. The other one of us went to graduate school in the ’70s, earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt. Then he went to Illinois State University and taught for 30 years. His speciality was children and families. In that time he had a professional practice of psychology, he trained graduate-level counselors, and he was a psychological consultant for numerous community agencies.

Thus, in our professional careers we have seen or consulted for thousands of children and families. We also had children ourselves in the ’70s and ’80s and knew dozens and dozens of their friends, in addition to their schoolmates. In that time, we can, together, tentatively identify only ONE person who appeared to be transgender. One, in 70 years of knowing children and 40 years of working with children and in the community for both of us.    

One could argue that transgender people would have kept this to themselves in these decades, but that seems a stretch. We worked with children/adolescents/families on a very intimate basis … hundreds and hundreds of them. We also worked with students and co-workers who were virtually all kind and accepting people. Dozens and dozens and dozens of other professionals, all of whom would have been extremely open and compassionate with any child who would have expressed transgender ideas.

While neither of us denies the idea that there are people whose gender identity does not match their biological sex, the issue is that there seems to be a virtual explosion in numbers. To write this observation off as being due to people being unwilling or unable to communicate their gender confusion in the past does not seem possible given the extremely large number of children and adolescents we have known personally and professionally, and the number of other professionals who we knew well who consulted with us on their most challenging cases. Why? What explains the apparent explosion?

Gary remarks on demonization:

The most jarring thing for me is to see conservatives and liberals painted with such negative “brushes” by the media. I know several people from all viewpoints stretching from very conservative to very liberal. They are all decent people with the good of the nation at heart. Caring for and loving one another is not limited to one political viewpoint.  On one side you hear conservatives explained as uncaring Neanderthals who want a 1950s patriarchy. On the other side you hear liberals illustrated as crazy people whose minds are twisted like pretzels to reconcile all their conflicting ideological views. The media seems unable or unwilling to treat everyone with dignity and respect just for being a human being.

The phrase serious literature comes with an unfortunate double meaning. When we call books serious, we mean they are satisfying, well written, and worthy of consideration. But we also use serious as an antonym for funny, which can mislead us into assuming that a good book shouldn’t make us laugh. That’s too bad, because humor is a bona fide literary effect, right up there with tragedy, suspense, and profundity—just as much a part of the author’s toolbox but a lot harder to fake.

Let’s be honest: What passes for funny in book marketing falls beneath the standard just about everywhere else. The number of published works that say “Hilarious!” on their cover but turn out to be merely quirky—or the dreaded wacky—is enough to make a reader cynical. The sense of desolation is deepened by the “humor” genre of commercial publishing, in which comedians and influencers monetize audiences they built on television or social media. Many of these books are entertaining, but they tend to prioritize individual gags over sustained effect in a way that crowds out all the other pleasures the reader might be looking for.

Admittedly, this problem seems inherent to the form. Most people who identify as funny learn to make people laugh in the short term, at the level of quips and retorts; to come up with a humorous turn of events is another thing. Memoirs and nonfiction expand this dilemma: If it’s hard to think of amusing plot points, then convincing the reader that real life is funny requires a borderline metaphysical power to shift perception. We might therefore conclude, after being advised for the umpteenth time to read John Kennedy Toole’s execrable A Confederacy of Dunces, that funny literature is a contradiction in terms. It is true that such books are hard to find—but they are out there, and I have recommended some here.

W. W. Norton and Company

The Code of the Woosters, by P. G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse is often cited as one of the great sentence-level writers in English literature, but he made his reputation during his lifetime by putting together clockwork plots. The Code of the Woosters is a Swiss watch. Dispatched by his aunt to the country estate of Sir Watkyn Bassett with instructions to steal a certain piece of antique tableware, the wealthy fool Bertram Wooster takes it upon himself to repair the broken engagement between his old school chum and Sir Watkyn’s daughter, all while dodging one Roderick Spode, a parody of the English fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Bertram’s genius butler, Jeeves, provides him with a steady drip of schemes to navigate this obstacle course, but their deceptions—and the at most intermittent competence with which Bertie executes them—keep getting him in deeper and deeper trouble. This 1938 novel combines old-fashioned dramatic irony with the conventions of farce to produce a high-water mark in Wodehouse’s Jeeves series.

Picador

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

In this satire of American race relations, Beatty makes comedy out of one of the most serious topics imaginable—a project he took on because, according to an interview in Rolling Stone, he “was broke.” The Sellout begins with the narrator, a Black farmer in the suburb of Dickens, California, appearing before the Supreme Court for bringing back segregation and slavery. How did he get there? One thing led to another. After his sociologist father is shot by police, the narrator inherits both his land and his informal role in the community: talking his neighbors out of bad ideas. He does not rise to the occasion, starting a segregated bus so that his friend can live out his fantasy of giving up his seat to a white woman, and then, after crime on the bus mysteriously vanishes, agreeing to expand the program to the local school. Beatty’s narrator isn’t an Uncle Tom figure or the “sellout” he is accused of being so much as a comfortable guy who has concluded that racism isn’t much of a problem anymore. The book’s lesson is not easily distilled, and Beatty relentlessly complicates it in ways that evoke the old maxim: It’s funny because it’s true.

Good Gossip, by Jacqueline Carey

This collection of interconnected short stories is set in late-1980s Manhattan, a done-to-death milieu that Carey revives with metered doses of irony. As controlled and closely observed as the best naturalist fiction, it treats the world of illegal sublets and trivial social distinctions with the light touch and wary empathy it deserves, making something comic out of material that many of Carey’s contemporaries sabotaged themselves trying to make profound. The stories are about, as the narrator puts it, people like her: everyone in New York “if … you took away the guys” and “the people who didn’t know normal things, like the shape of Florida,” and all the others who somehow fail to be like “me and my friend Liz.” Here is the narcissism of small differences, as an occasion not for contempt but for love. Carey’s husband, Ian Frazier, is better known, but she has accomplished something more difficult, threading the needle between capital-R realism and the kind of book you can enjoy as much as you appreciate.

Catapult

Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler

This novel by my favorite living essayist starts with a tragedy and ends somewhere more ambivalent. After the narrator’s boyfriend dies, she moves to Berlin and has a series of Young Writer–type experiences, such as drinking beer with other expats, going on internet dates, and taking conscientious but wage-appropriate care of other people’s children. Oyler makes this series of nonevents work by bringing a second layer of consciousness to the material—a suspicion of her own knowingness that captures the muddled project of curating yourself, of trying to be someone on purpose. The narrator reacts to her boyfriend’s death with a kind of guilty relief: It resolves all the tensions in their relationship without her having to do anything. But realizing that introduces a whole new set of problems. Oyler makes it funny by allowing her fictional stand-in to look petty, vain, and selfish—like a real person.

[Read: Lauren Oyler on the drama of swiping and scrolling]

W. W. Norton and Company

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman

Oh, for the days when famous scientists wrote amusing books instead of going on Twitter to correct the rest of us! Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics and helped determine why the space shuttle Challenger exploded; he also came from working-class Queens and spoke with an accent so thick that many of his peers accused him of putting it on. This episodic memoir, which ranges from his childhood in Far Rockaway to his work on the Manhattan Project to his life as a charmingly unreluctant public figure, keeps returning to one central theme: how funny it is to act dumb when you are in fact really, really smart. In a letter turning down an offer from the University of Chicago, he explains that the salary is so high, he would finally be able to afford a mistress, which would complicate his life to the point that he could no longer concentrate on physics. This kind of self-deprecation evokes Feynman’s first principle of science: “That you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Watching one of the greatest minds of the 20th century proceed as though he were a blockhead is an inspiration to those of us who will not be advancing the field of quantum mechanics anytime soon.

Graywolf

Erasure, by Percival Everett

Since the vaudeville era and the early days of Hollywood, ethnic minorities have defined American comedy on stage and screen, but the publishing industry seems to prefer that writers of color present themselves as the subjects of grim generational trauma. In Erasure, Everett goes straight at this limiting convention with a bitterness so evident that the reader cannot help but laugh. The English-professor protagonist, enraged by the success of his peer Juanita Mae Jenkins’s novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto and goaded by his agent’s complaint that his own writing is not “Black” enough, writes a book whose working title is My Pafology. He eventually changes it to Fuck. The full text of this fictional novel appears within the book, giving us both Everett’s parody of Black literature that panders to white audiences and his idea of what would happen if that parody were unleashed upon the world: First the author is ashamed, then he gets a bunch of money, and then he wins an award. Erasure suggests that the best time to write something funny is when you’re so angry that a laser is about to shoot out of your mouth.

[Read: Percival Everett’s revenge tale of a very rich man]

A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge, by Beau Sia

The modern poem seems to refuse to be funny on abstract principle: For every James Tate, there are a dozen turtlenecked postformalists intent on having no fun at all. Sia is not that kind of poet. A luminary of the tragically unhip but extremely fun New York City slam scene, he wrote ANWA II in response to the best-selling and deeply not good collection A Night Without Armor, by the pop singer Jewel. (The legend is that he did it in four hours.) Sia meticulously tracks Jewel’s book, using her titles as jumping-off points for his own verse, replacing the illustrations with crude pencil drawings and re-creating the original cover design, in which the author looks sad on a field of handwritten, painfully earnest lines (“I die on the page every time / What do you know about push-ups?”). There are definitely moments in this collection when he prioritizes the dick joke over the metaphysical conceit, but it reminds us that poetry can be vital and messy.

Ecco

The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt

This Western, narrated by the fatter and more sensitive of two brothers working as hired killers, starts with a rapturous description of the cool brother’s new horse: how strong and steady it is, its physical beauty and preternatural speed. The narrator juxtaposes this Cormac McCarthy–esque prose with the observation “My new horse was called Tub.” This kind of deadpan humor buoys deWitt’s novel without ever sinking to parody, making it a rare instance of a genre comedy that doesn’t break the frame. Charlie and Eli Sisters are dispatched to find a chemist who has discovered a mysterious and valuable formula. One a sociopath and the other just moody, the brothers travel across a 19th-century West that is comic and tragic by turns, searching for one fortune and finding another. The novel is an audience-seeking missile, combining the danger and forward momentum of pulp Westerns with a literary yearning for beauty and decency.

[Read: The Sisters Brothers is a brutal, funny, and surprisingly graceful Western]

Grand Central Publishing

The Stench of Honolulu, by Jack Handey

Handey’s best-known contribution to American letters remains his “Deep Thoughts” sketches on ’90s episodes of Saturday Night Live, but the man who wrote “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” works surprisingly well in prose. This intensely stupid, deeply wonderful comic novel is narrated by a frenzied dolt who presents Hawaii as a land of savagery. Handey manages to wield his comedic genius without breaking the boundaries of his narrator’s distorted worldview, so the tale is relayed with a potent combination of unearned confidence and complete ignorance. The book begins, “When my friend Don suggested we go on a trip to the South Seas together, and offered to pay for the whole thing, I thought, Fine, but what’s in it for me?” That’s about the register we’re working in, here: at once moronic and efficient. The density of jokes is Airplane!-level high, but Handey achieves a success rate unequaled in written comedy.