Last week, at a Fox News town hall (where else?), former President Donald Trump called China’s despot, Xi Jinping, a “brilliant” guy who “runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” Lest anyone doubt his admiration, Trump added that Xi is “smart, brilliant, everything perfect. There’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy.”

Trump is not alone. Many in the United States and around the globe see the allure of a dictator who gets things done and makes the trains run on time, no matter the rules or laws that stand in the way. According to repeated polling, roughly one in four Americans agrees with the statement that a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress and elections” is desirable. A much higher proportion of citizens agrees with that sentiment elsewhere, including in some of the most populous democracies: 55 percent of Indians, 52 percent of Indonesians, 38 percent of Nigerians, and 31 percent of Japanese.

This grass-is-greener view of authoritarian rule tends to emerge most often where governments are failing to meet popular expectations. When democracy delivers, dictatorship doesn’t seem like a rosy alternative. Only 6 percent of Germans and 9 percent of Swedes are seduced by strongmen.

[Brian Klaas: Democracy has a customer-service problem]

Admiration for autocracy is built on a pernicious lie that I call the “myth of benevolent dictatorship.” The myth is built on three flimsy pillars: first, that dictators produce stronger economic growth than their democratic counterparts; second, that dictators, unswayed by volatile public opinion, are strategic long-term thinkers; and third, that dictators bring stability, whereas divided democracies produce chaos.  

Two decades ago, the United States and its Western allies became embroiled in Iraq and later blundered into the financial crisis, leading think tanks to begin praising the “Beijing Consensus,” or the “China Model,” as an alternative to liberal democracy. Critiques of democracy surged in popularity in the era of Trump and Brexit. In the United States, intellectual publications ran articles arguing that the problem was too much democracy. In 2018, The Times of London published a column titled “Our Timid Leaders Can Learn From Strongmen.” China’s state media, capitalizing on the West’s democratic woes, argued that democracy is a “scary” system that produces self-inflicted wounds.

But events and new research in the past several years have taken a wrecking ball to the long-standing myth of benevolent dictatorship. All three pillars of the lie are crumbling. Every fresh data point proves Winston Churchill right: “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Let’s start with the myth that dictatorships produce stronger growth. This falsehood arose from a few well-known, cherry-picked examples, in which despots oversaw astonishing transformations of their national economy. Starting in the late 1950s, Lee Kuan Yew helped transform Singapore from a poor, opium-filled backwater into a wealthy economic powerhouse. And in China, per capita GDP rose from nearly $318 in 1990 to more than $12,500 today. Those successes are eye-popping.

But a systematic evaluation of the overall data reveals another reality. Even with these outliers of strong growth, most rigorous studies have found limited or no evidence that authoritarian regimes produce better economic growth than democratic ones. Some researchers, such as the political economists Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson, have found compelling evidence that the inclusive political institutions of democracy are one of the strongest factors in producing stable, long-term growth.

When authoritarian regimes do succeed economically, they often do so at a cost, because even booming dictatorships are prone to catastrophic busts. As the political scientist Jacob Nyrup has written: “China has within a 50-year time frame both experienced a famine, where 20-45 million people died, and an economic boom, where hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty.” The rosiest interpretation of the authoritarian economic data, then, is that autocrats may sometimes preside over marginally higher growth, but with a much greater risk of economic collapse. That’s not a wise trade-off.

However, the myth of strongmen as economic gurus has an even bigger problem. Dictators turn out to have manipulated their economic data for decades. For a long time, they’ve fooled us. But now we have proof: The reason their numbers sometimes seem too good to be true is that they are.

Every government has motivation to fudge its economic data. But democracies have institutions that provide oversight and block politicians from that impulse, ensuring accurate figures. No such checks exist in dictatorships.

That difference led Luis Martinez, an economist at the University of Chicago, to test whether despots were overstating their growth rate. He did so with an ingenious method. Previous studies have verified the presence of a strong, accurate correlation between the amount of nighttime light captured by satellites and overall economic activity. When economies grow, they emit more nighttime light (which is why you can clearly pick out cities on a nighttime satellite image, and why the density of light is so much lower in Africa than, say, in Europe or on the American East Coast). High-resolution images allow researchers to track changes in nighttime illumination over time, and the detailed, granular data these images produce are nearly impossible to manipulate. Martinez discovered an astonishing disparity suggesting that dictators have been overstating their GDP growth by about 35 percent.

And the more the numbers are checked, the more manipulation is exposed. In Rwanda, where The New York Times has named President Paul Kagame “the global elite’s favorite strongman” because of his apparently brilliant record of economic growth, the government claimed that it had decreased poverty by 6 percent from 2010 to 2014. Researchers found that the inverse was true: Poverty had actually surged by 5 to 7 percent. Fittingly, the notion that Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time was a lie; he built ornate stations and invested in train lines used by elites, but the commuting masses got left behind.

[Read: The undoing of China’s economic miracle]

Even China, the apparent authoritarian economic miracle, is showing signs of slowing down, its growth model no longer so well matched to the global economy. Such cracks in growth are an innate feature of autocracy. Because dictatorships criminalize dissent, normal mechanisms of economic feedback are broken, and the system doesn’t self-correct when blundering into economic mistakes. Beijing’s quixotic quest to maintain perpetual “zero COVID” was a case in point. Autocrats are adept at building ports and roads and mines. But thriving modern economies are sustained less by open mines than by open minds, of which dictatorships, by design, have a limited supply.

Advocates for the myth of benevolent dictatorship conveniently ignore a crucial fact, which is that much of the growth in autocracies comes either from manufacturing products that were invented in the more open societies of the democratic West, or from exporting goods to rich democracies. (The top destinations for Chinese exports are the United States, Japan, and South Korea.) In that way, even the outliers of autocratic growth depend for their success on the innovation and consumer wealth of democracies. Would China have lifted millions out of poverty through export-led growth quite so fast if democratic America hadn’t become an economic powerhouse first?

The myth’s second pillar turns out to be no less rickety than the first. It holds that dictators are more strategic long-term thinkers than democrats because they’re not beholden to fickle public opinion. But this lie is believable only if you don’t understand how most dictatorships actually work.

Over more than a decade, I’ve studied and interviewed despots and the henchmen who surround them. One conclusion I’ve drawn is that making decisions based on bad information is an intrinsic feature of the systems dictators run. The longer despots cling to power, the more likely they are to fall into what I call “the dictator trap,” in which they crush dissent, purge anyone who challenges them, and construct their own reality through propaganda, all to maintain control. Speaking truth to power in such a system can literally be deadly. As a result, dictators are told only what they want to hear, not what is true, and they begin to believe their own lies. Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic war in Ukraine is a tragic illustration of the dictator trap: Putin got high on his own supply, and innocent Ukrainians are the victims of his power trip.

Despots often use their power not for long-term planning, but for short-term self-glorification, as no end of examples can attest. Turkmenistan’s former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov blew millions to build, in his own honor, a golden statue that would rotate to always face the sun. In another stroke of genius, he closed all rural hospitals so that the sick could have the privilege of being treated in his pristine marble capital of Ashgabat. Most of the population lived outside the city, and countless thousands likely died because they couldn’t reach a hospital in time. His successor erected an enormous golden statue of his favorite breed of dog. Thankfully, democracies have checks and balances to suppress such narcissistic whims.

The most persistent pillar of the myth, however, is the one that holds that dictators produce stability. Some dictators have hung on to power for decades. Before his death, Muammar Qaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years. Paul Biya of Cameroon, an 89-year-old despot who had no idea where he was during a recent event, took office during the Vietnam War. Putin has been in power for more than two decades; Xi has ruled for only one so far, but he appears prepared to retain his position indefinitely.

To stay in power, authoritarian leaders face constant trade-offs. If they strengthen military or paramilitary leaders, they face the risk of a coup d’état. But if they weaken their men under arms, then they can’t protect themselves from external invasion. To keep their elites happy, despots need to make them rich through corruption—usually at the expense of the population. But a ruling class awash in ill-gotten gains could inspire a revolution, or a wild card: assassination. Autocrats appear stable, but they’re not. They’re constantly vulnerable, forced to make every decision based on what will stave off threats to survive in power.

The stability that does exist in autocracies is, ironically, derived partially from the trappings of democracy. Recent research has made clear that dictators have developed mechanisms to “mimic democracy to prolong autocracy.” Most authoritarian leaders now hold elections, but rig them. Some use parliaments or courts to enact unpopular decisions while avoiding blame.

[From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning]

Eventually, though, dictatorships tend to fall apart. And when they collapse, they really collapse. Elections in democracies change governments, not regimes. Personalist dictatorships, by contrast, often implode. When Qaddafi was killed, Libya disintegrated. He had deliberately designed the political system to function only with him at its center. The same could be true of Putin’s Russia. When he is toppled or dies, the country won’t have a smooth, peaceful transition.

The often-disastrous demise of autocrats creates a negative feedback loop. Nearly seven in 10 leaders of personalist dictatorships end up jailed, exiled, or killed once they lose power. While in power, many despots are aware of this grim fact, and so they use violence to stay in power, often growing more extreme as they lurch toward their downfall. The effect can hardly be called “stability,” even if the same person occupies the palace for decades.

For anyone who still clings to the illusion that dictatorships are likely to be prosperous, strategically wise, or internally stable, I propose a simple test. Imagine that someone wrote down the names of all the countries in the world on little slips of paper and then separated them into two hats: one for democracy, one for dictatorships. You would select one of the two hats, draw a slip of paper from it, look at the name, and then spend the rest of your life living in that country. Who knows, maybe you’d get lucky and end up in an authoritarian regime that seems stable and is producing steady growth. But I know which hat I would choose. And even if you fantasize about finding the unicorn that is a benevolent strongman, I suspect you do too.

The last memory I have of a certain former friendship, one of singular intimacy and closeness, involves watching an episode of the FXX show Dave. It was two summers ago, and a few of us had gathered for his birthday. As the night waned, slices of cake crumbling and cans of beer warming, we watched the show. We guffawed and recognized bits of ourselves in the group of strivers who were all trying, in some form, to make it. At the time, I was ignorant of the fact that my friendship would end abruptly the next day. But in the aftermath of that breakup, as I attempted to cope with the pain, I was surprised by how much Dave would also illuminate my notions of friendship—and its complications.

Dave is a loosely autobiographical show about Dave Burd, a.k.a. Lil Dicky, a white rapper who in real life has had modest success: In 2016, he was featured in XXL magazine’s influential “Freshman Issue” alongside Lil Yachty, 21 Savage, Anderson .Paak, and Lil Uzi Vert, among others. The show is also, more absurdly, one that focuses on Lil Dicky’s small, deformed penis (the result of a rare birth defect and several surgeries), which the artist fully embraces both inside and outside the series for body positivity as well as schtick. (Just consider his moniker.) Assembled in the show around Dave are friends who have been absorbed by his ambition to become a global star. Imagine combining Larry David’s neurosis with Kanye West’s hubris with a lighthearted genitalia fixation and you might conjure a decent approximation of the protagonist.

Much like Atlanta, Dave is hilarious, moody, artfully shot, and a commentary on contemporary American hip-hop culture. Many rappers and celebrities appear as themselves to comedic effect, and the series cleverly pokes fun at the obvious perils of a white dude seeking fame through a Black art form. But look past the hijinks and the studio sessions thick with smoke, bravado, and dick jokes, and Dave is fundamentally a show about male friendship that complicates the typically reductive on-screen bromance. It has some of the most raw depictions of male bonding on TV today, illustrating how race, culture, and ambition can both define—and confine—how men relate to one another. Even more important, the show attempts to convey how real vulnerability might be the best hope we have of transcending those barriers.

Early in Season 1, we meet Mike, Dave’s ginger-headed roommate and close friend who becomes his manager. The two are touchingly familiar—it isn’t unusual for them to part with unironic I love you’s or bathe together, with Mike trying out various ointments to cure the acne on Dave’s back. The scene that sets up the latter ritual takes place in a supermarket aisle with another character, the frenetic GaTa (pronounced like gator), Dave’s newest friend in L.A. and eventual hype man. Mike sidles up to them with a basket of new oils to try in the tub, expressing such earnest excitement that I found myself awaiting a punch line. But there wasn’t one, and I was left to check my reflexive reaction to what platonic male intimacy could look like.

At this point, Dave’s core friend group—and its unique dynamic—is taking shape. Elz, Dave’s wry producer and childhood best friend, played by Travis Bennett (a.k.a. Yung Taco from the rap group Odd Future), is soon added to the fold. Each character is allowed to be unique in his own way: absurd, misguided, extreme. Though race certainly inflects these relationships—Elz and GaTa are Black; Dave and Mike are white—the group is so raucous and tender that occasional tensions seldom disrupt their closeness.

Neither do profoundly personal issues. For instance, later in Season 1, at a rehearsal for an upcoming concert, GaTa’s energy is visibly off. Dave, Mike, and Elz can see that he’s pacing and overly agitated, but are frustrated about his seeming lack of preparedness. GaTa eventually sits on the couch and confesses that he’s bipolar. He has a “chemical imbalance,” he admits, through tears, and he takes eight to 10 pills a night to cope. Moved by GaTa’s vulnerability, the group rallies around him, and clearly begins to understand the intricate engine that powers their friend. The show thrums with this kind of collective revelation followed by understanding. Every time it occurs, the bonds among the four thicken further. Rewatching this episode, I thought of my former friend, and how hard it is to know what someone is going through or how much of it they’ve chosen to share. In order for a relationship to sustain itself and grow, curiosity must search out new things to know—and to love.

In a time of deep alienation, estrangement, and loneliness, such portrayals of male companionship are refreshing. For a long while, the bromances I most saw on-screen were in buddy-cop films such as the Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon franchises, where affection is earned after displays of strength or courage. Even newer and earnestly affectionate comedies such as I Love You, Man don’t focus as squarely as Dave does on how beautiful the romance of male friendship can be. On the show, effusive intimacy isn’t something reached after a villain has been defeated or a romantic conflict overcome, but is terrain worthy of exploration in itself.

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

Yet as male intimacy appears more and more in pop culture, so, too, does the complicated nature of its rupture. Hua Hsu’s potent memoir, Stay True (which, full disclosure, I designed the cover for), is a forensic reconstruction of a close friendship from college, written decades after a tragedy. Martin McDonagh’s darkly funny film The Banshees of Inisherin depicts the swift falling out between two old friends in a small Irish town, and the ways they struggle to cope.

Dave also contends artfully with separations between men—and plots one way to heal them. Friendships that grow from childhood can become complicated in adulthood, and this is embodied by the relationship of Elz and Dave, who have been thick as thieves from the age of 6. In one of Season 2’s standout episodes, Dave is paid a large fee to perform at a bar mitzvah in L.A. He and Elz have been sniping at each other—Elz is exhausted by Dave’s monomania, and Dave is jealous of Elz’s success working for more established rappers.

The animosity between them builds slowly, culminating in a game of one-on-one basketball as the bar mitzvah is being set up, their antagonism expressed in a series of quick cuts. The pair best each other with jump shots and drives; jabbed elbows, sweat, and grunts. They’re working out what language has failed to, physically sublimating their pain, which, unsurprisingly, proves an inadequate way to resolve conflict. Their predicament, the show suggests, is a result of the two having lost their ability to communicate openly. Still, by the episode’s end, when the party’s host boots Dave for the terrible influence he’s been on his son, Elz and Dave remember their antics at bar mitzvahs as kids, and summon the less-egoistic joy of their youthful transgressions. In an act of playful defiance, they open the gate penning in a herd of farm animals hired for entertainment and set them free.

This is typical of how conflicts between friends resolve on Dave: with a reminder that individual pride isn’t worth threatening their bonds. Season 3, which ended in May, is more preoccupied with traditional romance, as each character navigates dating, falling in love, and sex, though their friendships still evolve. But in the penultimate episode, a documentary of Lil Dicky’s tour is screened for the characters, featuring candid testimonials about Dave from his friends. The confessions are biting and loving in equal measure, and I found myself asking what my friends would say if they ever had such a chance. I wondered, in particular, what the friend I lost might offer.

Naturally, I played a role in the end of our friendship, but not knowing exactly how is a constant torment. We had no one-on-one game through which to try to work things out, let alone a joint moment of vulnerable frustration. The reason we’d watched Dave that summer night was because I’d insisted there were certain scenes he would appreciate; many references that used the lingua franca of our group. And I was right. I remember the satisfaction of his laughter. In hindsight, I wish it had prompted him to say whatever had been on his mind. I wish I’d been curious enough to ask before it was too late.

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Kaitlyn: As with any trend, it’s hard to tell whether the “indie sleaze” revival is real or imaginary, happening or being made to happen. There could be venture capital behind it. Or just regular capital. Last year, a photographer who was closely associated with the aesthetic back in the aughts was hired to document a fairly sleazy-looking party at a music venue in downtown indie-rock territory … hosted by, uh, Old Navy! But this newsletter isn’t about cultural criticism. It’s about going to stuff.

Recently, our friend Becca held an indie-sleaze-themed 31st-birthday party for herself in Prospect Heights, right in between Lizzie’s house and my house, which was very convenient. The invite said, “Come with the same energy as if it were 2010 and you were bringing your fake ID to a club on the LES that chloe sevigny went to once.” I didn’t relate to this, as I’m actually a little too young (brag) to have experienced the first indie-sleaze era in person. I only learned about it at the tail end on Tumblr.

Still, I was excited. I love a theme and I appreciate that Becca always provides one. I expected that she would execute it flawlessly, as I know that she went to NYU around the time of the Great Recession.

Lizzie: As far as I can remember, no one really called that whole thing anything the first time around, but now it’s been officially branded by a trend forecaster or whomever, which I guess makes it easier to talk about. Except it doesn’t. Even trying to define what “it” is feels like a losing battle, and that’s why Becca is braver than I am. Is it music? Disco shorts? 2007? 2010? Maybe, and I’m sorry, but … is it Terry Richardson?

Not saying I’m completely disconnected from the gist of whatever it refers to. The prematurely canceled and iconic public-access show New York Noise defined my high-school years, and I still sometimes wonder if Jeffrey Lewis did or did not see Will Oldham on the L train that one time.

Kaitlyn: I don’t get any of those references. Uh-oh!  

Day of the sleaze party, I was at Laundry City sorting out my whites when I had the idea that I should get Becca a copy of the 2009 Tao Lin novel, Shoplifting From American Apparel. I started my machines and then went on an hour-plus journey to five different Brooklyn bookstores, none of which had this historically significant text in stock. I need to work on my impulse control, I think. There was no reason to try five stores—the reference wasn’t even that good (alt-lit being only adjacent to indie sleaze), and a book is not a sexy gift. But once I got started, I was like, “Surely the Barnes & Noble?” I’m full of hope. After my sheepish return to Laundry City to put my long-finished laundry in the dryer, I settled for a gift the neighborhood could provide: a bouquet of Wet n Wild eyeliners and a sandwich bag of loose cigarettes.

When I got home, I changed into a skort and some tall socks and a T-shirt I got on Depop that says, in hot-pink lettering, My boyfriend is literally on stage. It was hard to wear that out on the street for the walk to Lizzie’s house in broad daylight.

Lizzie: Dressing was the most difficult part of the evening. I invited Ashley and Kaitlyn over for some sleaze-style pregaming (pizza, a Finger Lakes fizzy red, ’90s music videos) and to help me pick an outfit. The fit pickings were slim, but we landed on running shorts, a white Hanes T-shirt that I cut giant torso-revealing armholes into, and thigh-high tube socks with black stripes. Good enough if you don’t think too much about it and have no other options.

After we had covered the important topics of the week—HBO’s The Idol, corporate email-tracking systems, the superiority of Marcona almonds—Ash departed my apartment around 9, fully committed to leaving whatever indie sleaze was or is in her past. Kait and I walked our embarrassing outfits over to Becca’s and crossed our fingers that we wouldn’t see anyone on the way there except the rats.

PBR isn't bad, actually. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: Everyone had a different idea of what “indie sleaze” meant. (In this way, the theme was actually memory …) Luke was wearing a Natty Light snapback. Becca was wearing a skinny scarf and dark eye glitter. There was a Kate Moss–inspired look, and someone in a bikini top had a silver iPod. A bunch of the girls drew X’s on their hands in Sharpie and did that classic MySpace-photo concept where you stick your tongue out and pretend to be lighting it on fire. Remember when Taylor Swift tried an indie-sleaze music video where she had pink hair and skinny jeans and dated a guy who hit someone in the face with a billiards ball? Nobody was dressed as that.

Lizzie: There was a Death Grips album (The Money Store) taped up on the wall. The references must have spanned at least 10 years! But they were 10 years of our somewhat overlapping youths, so no one was going to start a rumble over minutiae.

Kaitlyn: Becca led us to a big bowl of “Jungle Juice.” It tasted like Smarties and the past! We feared it. Nathan showed up a few minutes after we did with Rebecca (a second Becca) and Bayne and two six-packs of Red Stripe. The apartment was crowded and everybody was shiny-faced, dripping sweat (on-theme), so we moved over to the far side of the living room, where the air-conditioning unit was doing its best work. On a side table that was not part of the party decor, a lamp was sitting on top of a stack of books: a David Foster Wallace, a Jonathan Franzen, and my book, by me. Wow! Of course I took a bunch of photos of this, with flash (on-theme), and was pleased even if it was a joke I wasn’t getting.

“People love to be in the kitchen,” Lizzie observed. True, the beating heart of the party was the breakfast bar, which was strewn with PBR cans and half-eaten pieces of pizza—people were laughing across it and touching each other’s arms and stuff, taking selfies, etc. But where we were standing, there was room to dance.

Lizzie: So we danced! Becca’s playlist really had us wiggling. The Strokes, Azealia Banks, MGMT, Spank Rock, Daft Punk. It was the soundtrack to some period of time in the past, probably adhering most closely to the span of Bloomberg’s three terms in office. Is Mike Bloomberg indie sleaze?

Kait left the dance floor to go “mingle,” but Nathan, Rebecca, Bayne, and I continued to groove in a manner that would’ve made Gregg Gillis proud. My bottle of Red Stripe seemed to warm up to hot-tea temperature within seconds, probably because of the heat from my hand as I did electro-clash aerobic exercises next to the glass coffee table. At one point, Nathan returned to the dance floor munching on a pre-eaten piece of pizza that he’d found somewhere. He poured my Jungle Juice into Kait’s abandoned cup and started to chug. But he didn’t get far. Like, not more than a few gulps. That was probably for the best.

If all this talk of Jungle Juice and sweat and bodies is making you wonder what the room smelled like, it was actually quite nice, because Becca had a Balsam Fir Yankee Candle burning. Cory Kennedy x Christmas vibes.

The best song ever made! (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: What a beautiful scene. I told Luke I appreciated that his British and American passports were part of the coffee-table-scape, and that I was sorry about Brexit. Wouldn’t it be great for him if he were part of the European Union? I was also sorry about his hometown’s recent news coverage. As you may have read, the stepson of one of the passengers on the destroyed OceanGate submersible attended a Blink-182 concert while his family member was lost at sea and posted about it numerous times in a tasteless fashion. This kid, like Blink-182 and Luke, is from San Diego, and he was wearing a San Diego Padres hat in a photo he shared of himself at the show.

Luke said something inspiring about life’s ups and downs. When the Padres were beating the Dodgers in last year’s playoffs, the fans sang Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” in the pouring rain—a peak. And now, a valley. At this point, the Jungle Juice was doing its work, so, unfortunately, I started screaming about baseball. Mark Canha (a New York Met who inexplicably displays his email address in his Instagram bio) is on the cover of the new issue of The Atlantic!

Lizzie: All night, we had heard talk of a roof. Imagine how cool, literally cool, the roof would be. It was nighttime on the roof. A wide open space, high in the sky. There was probably a breeze up there! We had to see it for ourselves. Instead of taking the elevator, we ran up, like, four flights of stairs. In hindsight, I couldn’t tell you why we did this, but maybe it was to make that first surge of Mother Nature’s cool air feel even better against the skin.

Kaitlyn: There’s nothing like being on a roof after you’ve been sweating. The Manhattan skyline doesn’t get old, and neither do we. We looked at the view and had some typical roof talk—Bayne theorized that women are socially conditioned not to whistle and everyone strongly disagreed with him. After airing out our armpits, we went back downstairs to get a bit more dancing in. Becca declared “Good Girls Go Bad,” by Cobra Starship featuring Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester, “the best song ever made,” and who could argue with her? Women are socially conditioned to be good and then go bad! [Flipping double middle fingers.]

Lizzie: We left before midnight, and Mariya said, “More like indie snooze,” which was a good burn and a fair point. But there comes a time in every sleazer’s life when the promise of mozzarella sticks and a bedtime weed gummy is more enticing than another round of hot beer and the existential feeling of time’s passage tracked by DFA Records releases. I scrunched my thigh-high tube socks back down to my ankles (disguise mode) and walked home.

Kaitlyn: Obviously, “indie sleaze” as a concept is pretty incoherent. (At the end of the “Good Girls Go Bad” video, Leighton Meester’s character is revealed to be a cop. PBR is owned by a holding company backed by a private-equity firm.) Historians still have no idea whether anything about it was meant to be ironic or if people just said that afterward because they were embarrassed.

Doesn’t matter! In Becca’s hands, a prompt is a prompt and a good excuse for a great night.

The chef presents me with a nugget of raw meat, tinged yellowish gray, then takes it back and drops it in a pan. “Today, you’re going to be having our whole-muscle chicken filet,” Daniel Davila tells me, searing the morsel. He lets it rest, chars some tomatoes and scallions, and throws together a beurre-blanc sauce. “Kind of a classic,” Davila says.

Davila works for Upside Foods, a start-up disrupting the world of animal proteins from its base in Berkeley, California. After a few minutes, he places the dish before me. I inhale, smelling salt and sear. I cut the meat, the serrations on the knife shredding it into strings. I take a piece and squish it, observing it bounce back and dampen my hands. I put a small amount in my mouth, chew carefully, and taste, well, not much. It tastes like chicken.

Is it chicken? It is chicken more than it is anything else. To be specific, it is what happens when you take a chicken’s cells, place them in a vat filled with a slurry of nutrients and amino acids, let them multiply, wash them, chill them, shape them, and cook them. The companies that make this animal flesh call it “cultivated” or “cultured” meat; the more common adjective outside the industry is “lab grown.” (The cells that I ate came from eggs, not from birds, by the way—so consider your next question answered.)

This kind of meat is the future, or at least part of the future. Within the past decade, cultivated meat has gone from science-fictional to hyper-expensive to market-ready, fueled by billions of dollars of start-up spending. Chicken made by Upside Foods, which launched in 2015, is now available at the Michelin-starred Bar Crenn in San Francisco, and will be headed to more restaurants soon. Newfangled plant-based meat, cultivated meat’s cousin, has already made it to the kitchen table. Beyond Burgers are available in thousands of grocery stores. You can buy Impossible Whoppers at Burger King.

[Read: The coming obsolescence of animal meat]

At the moment, manufacturers want to make alternative meats that taste as good as their animal counterparts. In some cases, they want to make products that are indistinguishable from them. And for many, the ultimate ambition is to make neo-meat that tastes better than the traditional meat you can buy in a store today. “Our first goal, and still our most important goal, is to make people recognize that this is the meat they’ve always loved for thousands of years,” Uma Valeti, Upside’s founder and CEO, told me. “There’ll be things that we can predict will happen in 50 years that are going to be fantastical.”

Fantastical is not usually a word associated with the traditional meat substitutes that American vegetarians know all too well. “The fundamental value proposition of alternative proteins,” Bruce Friedrich, the president of the Good Food Institute, an alternative-protein advocacy group, told me, “is that when they displace the products of industrial animal agriculture, they will have colossal climate, biodiversity, global-health, and animal-protection benefits.” In short, they are meant to do good, not taste good.

But the technological advances that companies have made in recent years exist whether or not these products end up cutting down the number of cows and winnowing carbon emissions. Plant-based and cell-based meats keep getting better and better. The scientists who are making them keep tweaking their aroma, texture, and flavor. And they are going to keep doing so in order to maximize consumer pleasure.

Imagine picking up some Wagyu beef as easily as you can buy ground chuck. Imagine the fried wings at your local greasy spoon having the unique marbled quality of meat from a Bresse chicken. Imagine if the roast-beef sandwich you make at home had the tender heft of prime rib, or if shrimp from the supermarket freezer had the sweetness and minerality of fresh-caught langoustine. Imagine purchasing chicken with the nutritional profile of wild-caught salmon.

Don’t stop there. Imagine grilling duck thighs juicy with Iberico pork fat. Imagine eating meat derived from the DNA of a dodo or a brontosaurus; Australia’s largest cultured-meat company, Vow, recently made meat from mammoth DNA. Imagine consuming meats grown from the most delicious cells from a menagerie of animals and plants—sea urchin, morel, blood orange. Imagine eating meat with the umami of a Dorito or the density of flavor of an Oreo. Vow is working on a food that, as the company’s co-founder and CEO, George Peppou, put it to me, is not a “faithful replica” of animal flesh. Rather, it will have its own characteristics—an earthy, mushroom-esque, quail-based product unlike anything anyone has ever had before.

Open your mind to unicorn meat. Because companies want you to open your mouth—and your wallet.

Until recently, few people were fooled by vegan burgers or expected a cultivated-protein nugget to taste better than chicken. Meat was meat—delicious, ubiquitous, all-American. Fake meat was fake. The bean burgers and not-dogs that began appearing in American grocery stores and on restaurant menus about half a century ago were generally aimed at vegetarians, hippies, and/or health nuts. In many cases, they were not meant to taste like meat; in even more cases, they were not that tasty at all.

The deepening catastrophe of climate change has made fake meat a matter of moral urgency. By some estimates, 15 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions come directly from animal agriculture. In the late aughts, a number of entrepreneurs cottoned on to the idea of reducing emissions by producing fake meat that carnivores could love. Venture capitalists have pumped billions of dollars into companies such as Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Eat Just, which set out to bring advanced materials science to bear on sausages, meatballs, and eggs.

For plant-based meat to taste more like meat, it needed to become more like meat at the molecular level, Priera Panescu, a chemist at the Good Food Institute, told me. Scientists needed to figure out how to lace plant-based proteins with fat—specifically, with fat that is solid at room temperature and liquid when heated, as lard and schmaltz are. (Fun fact: To do this, some companies use the same cryogenic equipment used to make Dippin’ Dots.) They needed to figure out how to develop long, stringy proteins, like the ones in muscle fibers, using industrial extruders. They needed to develop a meaty taste in plant products too. One big leap forward came when scientists at Impossible figured out how to grow heme—a compound that is found in blood and is a central reason beef tastes beefy—from yeast. “It took a lot of experimentation to expand the toolbox,” Panescu said.

[Derek Thompson: The capitalist way to make Americans stop eating meat]

In time, experimentation did expand the toolbox; plant-based burgers and sausages went from being lentil-based fiber pucks to pretty good imitations of the real thing. The Impossible Burger, for instance, really and truly tastes great. “The coconut fat will give it a lot of nice juice and sizzle and yumminess. And the heme will give it that red-meat look, feel, taste,” Peter McGuinness, the CEO of Impossible, told me. “When you put it on a grill, it’s gonna bleed, sizzle—and you’re going to have that whole sensory burger experience.”

A whole sensory experience very similar to the real one. In the past half decade, plant-based-meat companies and independent assessors have conducted blindfolded taste test after blindfolded taste test. Many consumers have proved incapable of telling what is real and what is fake; some chefs have too. In certain studies, people have even preferred the fake stuff.

Let’s stop and marvel at this for a moment. Human beings have been eating meat for as long as human beings have existed. “We have fossil animal bones with definite butchery marks left by stone tools,” Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, told me. “Two and a half million years ago, early humans, not even our species, were occasionally butchering animals, eating meat, and likely also eating fatty marrow.” (These primates were part of our great-grandparent species, she said, “still spending some time in the trees.”)

Eating meat is in our DNA. One prominent scientific theory even holds that meat-eating made us Homo sapiens. “Humans have really big brains,” Pobiner said. “They’re very big for our body size. They’re very energetically expensive. And so there is a hypothesis that what allowed for human brains to evolve so big is a high-quality food resource—namely, meat.”

Humans instinctively crave meat, seek it out, associate it with wealth and well-being. Frédéric Morin is the chef and an owner of Joe Beef, one of Montreal’s most feted restaurants, and a co-founder of the International Society of Neurogastronomy, a group dedicated to the study of why things taste the way they do. We chatted for a while about why meat tastes good: its fat content, its minerals and micronutrients, the compounds that give it umami. He emphasized its emotional and cultural significance as well. “Meat has a position in a lot of cultures as a celebratory dish—the ceremonial killing, or the slaying of the animal,” he told me.

Somehow, though, scientists have figured out how to make such a delectable product out of yeast and peas that we at times cannot tell the difference. In just a decade, plant-based meat has reached the point of taste parity. It has gone from being a niche food for vegetarians to a product consumed by four in 10 Americans.

Photograph by Thomas Albdorf for The Atlantic

Plant-based meat’s techie cousin, lab-grown meat, has developed on a parallel path, though its advances have been slower and more expensive. Scientists first grew animal tissue in vitro at the turn of the 20th century, leading futurists to theorize that the era of the feedlot and the slaughterhouse might soon come to an end. “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing,” Winston Churchill predicted in 1931, before becoming occupied with other matters. Yet the first cultured meat did not debut until the late 1990s. The first cultivated burger arrived in 2013. The first cultivated meat was approved for sale to the public in 2020, in Singapore.  

Growing pig- or cow-muscle cells in a laboratory is not the problem, Amy Rowat, a biophysicist at UCLA, told me; making a large quantity of meat with an appetizing texture at a reasonable price point is. “We can grow cells in petri dishes in a lab—that’s what we do for biomedical sciences. But for that purpose, you might want milligrams of cells,” she explained. “For food production, you want kilograms. It’s orders of magnitude more, and the technical challenges are different.”

Challenge one: gathering crucial ingredients without killing a lot of cows first. Until recently, companies primarily used fetal-bovine serum as a growing medium for cultivated meat. This was costly and raised significant ethical concerns: Producing a single burger’s worth of lab-grown meat required extracting blood from the fetuses of numerous slaughtered pregnant dairy cows. (Firms now have access to a variety of synthetic and natural alternatives, such as those made from algae.)

Challenge two: growing animal tissues in a lab environment without also breeding fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Sheep and chickens have an immune system that works up until the point of slaughter, keeping their muscles healthy within their body. Industrial vats of warm, nutrient-rich liquid do not, making contamination a tricky, expensive problem for cultivated-meat firms to solve.

Challenge three: producing commodity quantities of meat. Ricardo San Martin, the research director of UC Berkeley’s Alternative Meats Lab, explained that getting enough oxygen to growing cells is difficult: “The cells excrete certain compounds. In a huge fermenter, you cannot get those gases out, which inhibits their growth. And once the cells start crunching together, the liquid becomes like a viscous soup.” For that reason, cell-based meat needs to be made in small bioreactors, eliminating higher-order economies of scale. Indeed, the trade publication Food Navigator has estimated that it would take $1.8 trillion worth of factories to produce 10 percent of the world’s supply of meat by 2030.

Challenge four: growing anything other than a viscous soup. Rowat explained that scientists have figured out how to grow muscle cells in a warm amino-acid bath. Compacting them into hamburgers, hot dogs, fish balls, nuggets, luncheon meat, and meatballs is straightforward. Making a uniform cut of meat, like a chicken breast, is challenging but feasible. But making multicomponent cuts, such as a steak marbled with fat, remains impossible for some firms and prohibitively expensive for others. (And nobody, I would note, is making a bone-in lamb leg or a shell-on shrimp.)

Fortunately, making lab-grown meat taste good is not that difficult. Chicken cells taste like chicken. Cow cells taste like beef. “There seem to be some intrinsic properties for cells to basically taste like you would expect,” Elliot Swartz, a molecular biologist at the Good Food Institute, told me. Cultivated-meat start-ups grow tons of cells, then choose which ones taste the best. “When we harvest certain cell types, some have a more organ-y flavor,” Valeti told me. “We’ll make a note and say, ‘Hey, this one has more organ-meat-type features.’”

What do the rejected products taste like? I asked a number of food scientists and start-up employees that question and was met with understandable omertà. Still, a few folks were forthcoming. Swartz noted that he had recently tried a “30-percent-animal-cell hybrid product” made with shrimp; the rest was plant-based. “If you have 100 percent of the [shrimp] cells in there, it’s actually so overpoweringly shrimpy” that people do not like it, he told me. “For whatever reason, those cells tend to aggregate the flavor molecules more efficiently than some other cell types.”

Several start-up employees mentioned problems with texture more than taste. One described eating a number of hybridized products: beef-muscle cells grown in a vat with pork-fat cells, for example; a kind of lab-grown bologna. “It had a porridge texture,” the person, who requested anonymity because they did not have permission to speak with a reporter, told me. “It haunts me.”

[Read: The woolly-mammoth meatball is an all-time-great food stunt]

“The biggest challenge is the lack of elasticity,” said Peppou of Vow, the company that recently grew meat from mammoth DNA. “Meat has this inherent elasticity to it, which is really, really unique and special. That’s a really hard thing to replicate. And it’s a really hard thing to grow. A lot of time, you put it in your mouth and it has the flavor of meat, then you bite down and … you’re like, Hang on a second. That’s not right.” He noted that the company had produced “what I can only describe as bread. We had a bunch of cultured meat, which was bread. It was really surreal. You’re cooking it up. It smells like meat. You put it in your mouth, and it has exactly the texture of bread.” He added that “slimy” meat was among some of Vow’s other “crappy prototypes.”

Yet the scientific process has worked. Crappy prototypes have become good prototypes. And good prototypes are becoming better as cell-based and plant-based companies borrow techniques from one another. The future is not making plant-based sausages or lab-grown chicken. It is seeding plant-based scaffolds with animal muscle and fat cells, making technological marvels from synthetic and fermented and extracted materials. The plant-based products give the animal cells structure; the animal cells make the plant-based products taste better, and give the finished product that characteristic chewy texture and tender mouthfeel. (If any of this sounds gross, I would suggest looking at video footage from a meatpacking plant.)

In the coming years, millions of consumers will have a chance to eat the kinds of meat that I sampled while reporting this story. Upside has focused on making chicken filets—the meat equivalent of a Toyota Corolla. Other firms are thinking more about making Bugattis or Teslas. Orbillion Bio is one of the start-ups focused on luxury meat. “What is the product we can bring out that is a premium experience and brings to the customer a fantastic first touch point?” Patricia Bubner, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told me. “We really are married to that farm-to-table story, meaning we partner with farmers that have breeds with a 500-year breeding history, like Japanese Wagyu, where we know this is the best-flavored meat there is.”

Peppou, for his part, told me that he’s worried about trying to re-create in a factory something normally grown on a farm. “The first wave is trying to use familiarity as a way of anchoring to what people know,” he said. But he is not thinking about producing a Toyota or even a Bugatti. Vow’s quail-mushroom combination is more like a spaceship.

In the longer term, neo-meat pioneers will develop the ability to alter the nutritional profile of the meats they create, dialing down the fat and dialing up the protein, adding in more micronutrients. They want to alter taste and texture to match different palates. They aspire to grow huge amounts of rarely available cuts. They hope to create meats with no referent in a current supermarket—ones that taste wild, weird, beyond.

Will consumers want products that do not taste like the meat they already know and love? Will they accept lab-grown products that do?

I wondered about those questions as I ate my Impossible Whopper, grilled my Beyond sausages, and sampled Upside’s chicken. Plant-based meats perform well against conventionally produced meat in controlled taste tests, but life is not a controlled taste test. A plant-based burger might taste as good as a decent burger, but it is hard to imagine it tasting as good as a perfect burger—let alone replicating the experience of eating a rib eye. “We’re close in terms of taste, texture, and flavor, but we’re not there yet,” McGuinness of Impossible Foods told me. And omnivorous consumers have only so much desire to buy products that are not there yet: The sales volume of plant-based meats has plateaued in the past few years.

Lab-grown meat faces a similar challenge. Upside’s chicken tastes like chicken because it is made of chicken-muscle cells. But the product has no blood in it, hence the strange yellow-gray color. It is made from one kind of cell, whereas a chicken thigh you buy at a grocery store might contain scores of different kinds. The replica tastes good. But I struggled to see how it might have the compulsively edible, transcendent taste of a crispy, salt-roasted bird.

Not that I personally have a good sense of what such a thing would taste like. I haven’t eaten meat in something like a decade. Again and again, I’ve marveled at how good these things taste, because lentils and black-bean burgers and chik’n nuggets are my point of comparison. Yet, again and again, I’ve heard omnivores describe them in appreciative but wan terms: surprisingly tasty for what they are.

So one snowy night around Thanksgiving, I visited Frédéric Morin at his temple of gastronomic excess in Montreal. We sat at the corner of the bar, and Morin spoke in French to his hyper-attentive staff; glasses and dishes began appearing in front of me. We chatted about surviving in the restaurant business, loving food, and raising kids. And I ate and drank. A loamy glass of red. Oysters, briny and sweet. A pastry. Then a small piece of beef, real beef, that Morin himself had personally aged in pomace. “The preparation, the envisioning of the meal,” he said. “It is like pachamanca or Texas barbecue or Hawaiian luau—the long anticipation and preparation is part of the process.”

I was worried about being grossed out, spitting the food out or grimacing in front of the chef or getting sick. But it wasn’t gross. It was just strange, far and away the trippiest thing that I had eaten in recent memory. In my notebook, I jotted down that “steak gets bigger in your mouth” when you chew it, something plant-based food categorically does not do. I noted that it tasted mineral, like licking a metal pole. I struggled to come up with words to describe it. It felt like food from Mars.

This, I understood, must be what omnivores experience when eating lab-grown meat—alienation and intellectual engagement. More than that, I understood that it might take decades for science to advance to the point where man-made meat will be able to compete truly and wholly with conventional meat, cut by cut, mouthful by mouthful.

Even if it could compete, would people eat it? As Morin pointed out, taste is a psychological process, not just a mechanical one. It’s not just about micronutrients and fats and texture; it’s about how people think and feel about the food they are eating. “It is bigger than the sum of what the food contains, in my mind,” he told me. To that point: Wine tastes better to folks if they believe it is an expensive label. Cheese and yogurt taste worse if the products are described as low-fat.

“Even if they got it 100 percent perfect, meaning that no one could tell the difference between cultivated meat and real meat, I still think there’s going to be a lot of barriers that have nothing to do with cost or technology and everything to do with people’s attitudes, thoughts, and psychology toward things grown in a petri dish,” A. Janet Tomiyama, a psychologist at UCLA, told me. She pointed to research on what is known as “food neophobia,” for instance. “People do not like eating new things,” she said. “That’s an evolutionary protection mechanism we have so we don’t eat a random berry that’s poisonous.” She also pointed to research indicating that people prefer foods that seem natural. People want food to come “from a farm, not a lab,” she said.

Morin, for his part, told me that he loves vegan food and junk food; he is not a purist. “McDonald’s—you can’t compete with that,” he said, noting how perfect the chain’s french fries are. “The only thing we can compete on is the narrative!” But he said he rejects the idea of growing meat in a vat, whatever the taste. “To me, it does not matter if it is a perfect facsimile of everything I enjoy in life,” he told me. Lab-grown meat strikes him as scientific, strange, a rejection of the real. It reminds him, he told me, of cannibalism. He described it as an “intellectual rabbit hole” more so than food.

[Read: The secret ingredient that could save fake meat]

Yet for all that we humans seek out natural foods and avoid new and strange ones, we are also extraordinary omnivores. We are like raccoons and rats, which eat pretty much anything, rather than pandas, which consume bamboo almost exclusively, the Wayne State University anthropologist Julie Lesnik told me. Indeed, there’s very little we won’t eat, I thought—endangered animals, Doritos, high-fructose corn syrup, hot dogs, blue cheese. And for all our mythologizing of our antelope-spearing ancestors, she added, those primates got much of their protein the same way our nonhuman primate cousins do today: eating bugs.  

Plus, the Smithsonian’s Pobiner, to my surprise, qualified what she said about the theory that meat-eating made us human. One theory does indeed hold that meat itself was the key variable, she told me. But she sees better evidence that processing food was what made us into ourselves. “We do not really see a big increase in brain size, relative to body size, until about 1 million years ago,” she said, when our grandparent species seems to have started cooking. “Maybe it’s not so much raw meat; it’s cooked meat. Maybe it’s being able to get more resources out of the food you already have, making things palatable that would have been poisonous.” She also pointed to research showing that other primates eat meat not just for the calories or the nutrients, but for social reasons: Hunting and eating meat helps chimpanzees bond with other members of their troop.

Food scientists are extraordinary at making things palatable; the advances in alternative proteins in just the past decade are a prime example of that. Yet whether American consumers choose to buy neo-meat ultimately might have less to do with exactly what it tastes like than with what those consumers believe about it. Does it taste good? Do we think it tastes good?