The Joy of Cooking, one of the most popular cookbooks in American history, entered kitchens in 1931 with a simple premise: Anyone can learn to make a meal. The Depression had disrupted the food supply, leaving a generation of new homemakers doubting their ability to furnish healthy, varied dishes from sparse pantries. The book’s popularity lay in author Irma Rombauer’s approachable, if I can do this, you can too tone, an attitude that would help change how everyday Americans made dinner.

Nearly a century later, another generation of young cooks has faced another global catastrophe, and emerged with their own relationship to cooking. While the coronavirus pandemic sent millions of Americans away from restaurants and into their kitchens, its culinary impact was formative for Gen Z, many of whom were in their teens or early 20s when it began. Whether stuck in their parents’ homes or on their own, these young people embraced cooking as an act of independence and, as one researcher told me, coping. On TikTok, cooking tutorials have hundreds of millions of views. Today, cooking has become a major generational avocation and source of pride.   

The pandemic fundamentally disrupted many young people’s day-to-day life—school, sports, spending time with friends—and, with it, the anchor of routine. For example, Mia Kristensen was 16 when her high-school classes shifted to Zoom. Around this time, she first downloaded TikTok. The bright vegetable bowls she saw her peers making—familiar to her as a vegan, but somehow finer, more inspiring—became aspirational. Cooking was something to look forward to during the day, she told me. Making dinner from scratch became an achievement.

TikTok certainly helped with cooking’s proliferation, as it dished out entertaining, accessible cooking tutorials by and for young people marooned at home. The medium met the moment, just as it had before: Irma Rombauer paved the way for Julia Child on television, J. Kenji López-Alt on YouTube, and now TikTok creators, whose pandemic-era videos helped convey that everyone was managing as best they could. People were in their own kitchens, yes, but displaying their handiwork in one global digital setting.

[Read: The best kind of food to cook during a pandemic]

There seems to be no sign of “kitchen fatigue” now, according to MaryLeigh Bliss, the chief content officer at YPulse, a marketing firm that researches Gen Z and Millennial habits. In fact, saving money is an additional motivation to keep cooking. As more and more Gen Zers enter the workforce, they face steep housing, goods, and education costs. According to one report, more than half of Gen Zers surveyed have an anxiety disorder, citing worry about the future as the top cause.

Indeed, researchers told me that knowing how to cook—even if it began as pandemic escapism or an economic consideration—has become a key identity marker for Gen Z. This generation tends to define itself through hobbies, many discovered online, like mastering a video game or knitting a scarf. Cooking as a pastime—like being a “foodie” before it—can signal a number of values, according to Kathy Sheehan, a senior vice president of Cassandra, a market-trends research firm. It might say someone is interested in different cultures, or prioritizes shopping for local, seasonal produce.

Zoomers are particularly concerned with building well-rounded lives, and cooking reflects this, Roberta Katz, a cultural anthropologist and the author of Gen Z, Explained, told me. Cooking is a creative act that can serve as a quiet interlude, largely free from technology. For young people who’ve spent nearly their whole lives with the internet and the iPhone, cooking’s tangibility can be stabilizing. “It grounds you in a world that’s in constant motion,” Katz told me.

That tactility was important to Celeste Mosley, 21, who told me she became depressed during the pandemic. After finding a rice-pudding recipe on TikTok, making it became, “the only thing that got me out of the bed half the time,” she said. Pour the rice. Slice the butter. Stir, stir, stir. The process became meditative for her. This isn’t a surprise: The process of cooking can improve one’s mood as well as one’s anxiety, according to Nicole Farmer, a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center who studies behavior and nutrition. Following directions connects the task at hand with past experiences—I’ve strained tomatoes like this before, or This pasta is new, but I know how to use oregano. Cooking’s combination of new and familiar actions can boost the brain’s “effortless attention” and executive-planning function, which can alleviate depression symptoms. In one study, adolescents skilled in the kitchen reported lower levels of depression than less culinarily inclined peers.

In simple terms, cooking commands your full attention and all of your senses. You must juggle skills, whether culinary (slicing), cognitive (planning), or creative (constructing a meal from ostensibly incongruous leftovers in the fridge). You might feel raw rice through your fingers, hear knives clattering on cutting boards, smell a turkey roasting. Cooking, Farmer suggests, can boost self-confidence; it also facilitates social bonding when meals are shared.

[Read: What home cooking does that restaurants can’t]

Now in my 40s, I remember one college summer, proudly leaving my shifts at a bakery heaving an enormous black bag over my shoulder, Santa-style, with the day’s bounty of unsold treats. My five roommates and I largely subsisted on leftover muffins for dinner—they were both filling and free. And weren’t the berries lodged in them part of a major food group? Among the skills I acquired in the winding thicket of young adulthood, cooking was not one.

But my friends’ teenage son, who told me he hadn’t known that he liked to cook before the pandemic, recently served eight of us a dinner of chicken with lemon and garlic sauce, red-lentil soup, and flan. He is preparing to leave for college, but learned how to make shakshuka for breakfast from a viral video. He can taste something in a restaurant and replicate it at home. Whether or not Gen Z has read The Joy of Cooking, it has navigated its own relationship with food through historical disaster, and ended up with both a life skill and a craft.

Throughout the summer, the Progressive Change Institute, a prominent grassroots organization aligned with Democrats, teamed up with the White House to promote President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. The group helped organize events across the country, including in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, to publicize one of the president’s most popular proposals: a crackdown on unnecessary or hidden consumer charges popularly known as “junk fees.”

The institute was encouraged by how much positive local-media coverage the events generated, taking it as a sign that a concerted campaign could lift the president’s lackluster approval ratings ahead of his reelection bid. Its leaders were eying a second round of activity this fall to amplify Biden’s record on lowering prescription-drug and child-care costs.

Since October 7, however, those plans are on hold. Many progressives are protesting the administration’s support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, which began after Hamas’s massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis and has left more than 16,000 dead, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health ministry. On perhaps no other issue is the gap between Democratic leaders and young progressives wider than on the Israel-Palestine conflict. “It’s just a reality that the Middle East crisis is a superseding priority for many activists and takes oxygen out of the room on other issues the White House needs to break through on,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. “We’ve let that be known.”

Biden had hoped to extend a fragile week-long truce that the United States helped broker between Israel and Hamas, during which Hamas returned dozens of hostages it had captured on October 7 in exchange for the release of three times as many Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. But now that cease-fire has ended. And the president’s advocating unconditional aid to Israel and his embrace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims have fractured the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to reassemble in order to beat Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner for 2024.

[Franklin Foer: Inside Biden’s ‘hug Bibi’ strategy]

The president had won over many of his critics on the left—the institute’s campaign arm, for example, had backed one of his more progressive rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren, in the 2020 Democratic primary before supporting Biden—with his run of domestic legislative victories during his first two years in office, including a major climate bill last year. Now left-wing groups that worked to persuade and turn out key constituencies in 2020, especially young and nonwhite voters, are participating in demonstrations against the president’s Middle East policy rather than selling his economic message.

“Our public communications have been transformed by this moment,” says Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, which initially endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020 but spent the general-election campaign mobilizing progressive voters for Biden in swing-state cities such as Phoenix, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.

The Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group associated with the Green New Deal, has never been a big fan of Biden. But its leaders worked with the White House over the summer as the administration developed the American Climate Corps, an initiative to train 20,000 young people for jobs in the clean-energy industry. When Biden announced the program in September, the Sunrise Movement hailed it as “a visionary new policy.” Two months later, the group joined activists holding a hunger strike outside the White House in protest of Biden’s support for Israel’s offensive. Given the president’s stance, “we cannot explain his policy to our generation, and that makes it very difficult for any of his administration’s good deeds to resonate,” Michele Weindling, the Sunrise Movement’s political director, told me.

Young people in particular have soured on the president, a big factor in poll results showing Biden trailing Trump in a potential 2024 general election. Voters under the age of 30 backed Biden by 24 points in 2020, according to exit polls; some surveys over the past few weeks show Biden and Trump nearly tied among the same cohort.

“Man, it is jaded right now among this generation,” Elise Joshi, the 21-year-old executive director of Gen-Z for Change, a group of social-media activists that organized under the banner of “TikTok for Biden” during the 2020 campaign, told me. Young voters’ disenchantment with the president predates October 7; they have long been more likely than older people to rate the economy poorly, and the Biden administration’s approval earlier this year of oil and natural-gas projects in Alaska and West Virginia frustrated younger climate activists. But anger toward the president erupted once Israel began shelling Gaza. “There’s been a surge since October 7,” Joshi said. “When it comes to Gaza, there’s little optimism that there’s much of a difference between the Democratic and the Republican Party.”

[Read: Is Biden toast?]

Biden, along with his party’s most powerful members of Congress, have broadly supported Israel’s war against Hamas despite their discomfort with Netanyahu’s conservative government. That stance is in accord with polls of the general public, but not with the views of more liberal voters. In protests on college campuses and elsewhere, left-wing demonstrators have denounced Israel as an apartheid state waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing—or worse—against the Palestinians. “Instead of using the immense power he has as president to save lives, he’s currently fueling a genocide,” Weindling said of Biden.

When the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC)—the political affiliate of the Progressive Change Institute—surveyed more than 4,000 of its members in early November, just 8 percent said they supported the actions of the Netanyahu government, and more than two-thirds wanted Biden to do more “to stop the killing of civilians.” In Biden’s support for Israel, many young progressives see a Democratic president giving cover to a far-right leader whose bid to weaken Israel’s judiciary sparked enormous protests only a few months ago. “There is a serious disconnect between arguing that you are a bulwark against authoritarianism at home and then aligning with authoritarians abroad,” Mitchell told me.

When asked for comment, the Biden campaign touted the continuing support of a wide array of “groups and allies from across our 2020 coalition” that it considers essential to reelecting the president next year and have not been reluctant to help the campaign over the past two months. In addition to the immigrant-advocacy group America’s Voice and the abortion-rights PAC Emily’s List, those groups include youth-led organizations who say that, as the election nears, opposition to Trump among Gen Z will easily outweigh concerns about Biden’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. “Joe Biden and Donald Trump are like night and day for young people,” Santiago Mayer, the 21-year-old founder of the Gen Z group Voters of Tomorrow, told me. “I can’t really be convinced that both of these candidates have an equal chance of winning over young people.”

In a national Harvard University poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released yesterday, just 35 percent of respondents said they approved of Biden’s performance overall. And only 25 percent said they trusted Biden to handle the Israel-Hamas war, less than the 29 percent who said they trusted Trump on the issue. But this survey had better news for the president than other recent polls: In a hypothetical head-to-head 2024 matchup, Biden led Trump by 11 points, and that advantage grew to 24 points among those who said they will definitely vote next year.

NextGen America, a young voter group founded by the billionaire Tom Steyer, endorsed Biden’s reelection over the summer. Its president, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, pointed out that polls show that young voters prioritize inflation, climate change, and the prevalence of gun violence over foreign policy. But she told me that the level of opposition to Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war was significant. “We encourage the administration to listen to the concerns that young people have on this issue,” Ramirez said.

[Ronald Brownstein: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?]

Biden has shifted his rhetoric in the past couple of weeks, acknowledging the high civilian death toll in Gaza and intensifying pressure on Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and agree to a pause in the fighting. Last Tuesday, he angered pro-Israel hawks with a post on X (formerly Twitter) quoting a passage from a speech he had recently delivered. In context, it was a push for a two-state solution, but devoid of that context, many read it as a push for an extension of the cease-fire in which he appeared to equate Israel’s military offensive with a campaign of terror. “To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek,” the president wrote. “We can’t do that.”

Pro-Palestinian progressives told me they view the change in language, as well as Biden’s involvement in brokering the short-lived truce, as evidence that their activism is working. But their goal is a permanent cease-fire that will allow Palestinians to return to—and in many cases, rebuild—their homes in Gaza and resume their push for statehood.

None of the activists I interviewed was certain about how lasting the political damage Biden has suffered among progressives will be. Elise Joshi said she had seen a rise in young people vowing on TikTok not to vote for Biden. “We’re almost certain that we’re going to have the same 2020 choices,” she said. “But whether we’re excited to vote or have people who don’t feel comfortable showing up or feeling too jaded to show up to vote is dependent on this administration.”

The election, however, is still nearly a year away. And interest groups often warn about their voters staying home partly as a way to pressure a presidential administration to change course. Should the war end in the coming weeks or months, the issue is likely to fade from the headlines by Election Day. Groups like the PCCC and the Working Families Party aren’t threatening to withhold support for the Democratic ticket when the alternative is Trump. In previous presidential races, early polls have shown tighter-than-expected margins for Democrats among young and nonwhite voters only for those groups to come back around as the election neared. “It’s not Will the coalition show up? It’s At what rate?” Mitchell told me. “Today,” he continued, “I’m looking at a fraying coalition that needs to come together.”

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For the second consecutive time, the Oxford English Dictionary crowned an internet-slang term its word of the year. This year’s choice—rizz—is meaningful only to the extent that it reminds us of the dictionary’s role as a responsive, living object.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Our 10 favorite books of 2023 How to be anti-Semitic and get away with it The single biggest fix for inequality at elite colleges If Trump Wins: Corruption unbound

‘Here Lies Rizz’

The reason I know what rizz means is so inane, it’s not even worth getting into. It involves a TikTok video, and a tweet about the video, and an explainer article I read to try to decrypt the meaning of the sentence “Livvy rizzed him up; Livvy even hugged Baby Gronk” over the summer. Rizz, which refers to someone’s ability to flirt by being charismatic, was never a word I thought all that much about. But the fact that it was just crowned the word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary is a reminder that a dictionary is a dynamic corpus, evolving right alongside language and capable of responding even to internet phenomena that are just entering the mainstream.

People tend to think of the dictionary as old and fusty, which is partly why the dissonance of seeing it address slang—the dictionary knows what rizz is?—makes us laugh. But the job of a good dictionary is to keep up closely with new interventions in how we talk. The selection of the word of the year differs a bit from a dictionary’s everyday work; Jonathan Dent, a senior editor at Oxford English Dictionary, described it in an email as a chance to “take a snapshot of a particular aspect of language use,” noting that it remains to be seen whether rizz “sticks around long enough” to make it into the OED’s dictionaries. The project of naming a word of the year highlights the dictionary’s role as a descriptive project rather than a prescriptive one, my colleague Caleb Madison, The Atlantic’s crossword editor (who has worked at OED), told me.

Especially in the digital age, dictionaries have many tools to trace how people use language. Because language changes so quickly on the internet, those who compile and update the dictionary turn to the public for information: What words are people searching for, or using in online conversations? That participation is literal during the selection process for the word of the year: Since 2022, OED has asked the public to narrow down a provided shortlist of words of the year to four finalists, before editors make the ultimate call. Think of a dictionary less like a natural-history museum and more like a zoo, Caleb suggests. Its role is not just to teach us about the past and what is settled but to explore what is happening now, in the wild.

Rizz emerged on internet and gaming platforms before it seeped out toward a wider audience (Tom Holland seemingly helped matters by using the word in an interview). The word is distinctive for linguistic reasons: abbreviations are not usually pulled from the middle of a longer word. Rizz, which is derived from the word charisma, joins the small but distinguished company of words such as fridge in this regard. Also, Caleb noted, “a double-Z ending is funny and fun to say.” (Z, he added, is a 10-point Scrabble letter.) Other organizations have taken notice: Rizz was a runner-up for the American Dialect Society’s word of the year in 2022, losing out to the suffix -ussy. In September of this year, Merriam-Webster announced that it had added rizz to its dictionary, alongside goated, cromulent, and bussin’, and it also noted rizz as one of the year’s top words.

For decades now, dictionaries have been naming words of the year in an apparent effort to capture the zeitgeist and get people talking about words (OED began doing so in 2004). Reading a list of past OED words of the year offers a portal to moments in language: We can recall a recent era when terms such as GIF and podcast felt novel. Sometimes, the words capture the dominant political tensions of the time: climate emergency in 2019, and post-truth in 2016. In 2020, no single word was chosen, and in 2021 it was vax. Last year, the term was borrowed from internet culture too: goblin mode. As Caleb wrote at the time, going “goblin mode” is to look inward and indulge our private weirdness. “As we emerge from our caves after that long hibernation, our goblin-selves lurk somewhere deep inside us, beckoning us back home to vibe out,” he wrote. This year’s term (along with finalists such as Swiftie and situationship) is more social and reliant on turning toward others, perhaps a reflection of a shifting societal mood.

A dictionary is not prescriptive, but the word-of-the-year designation can help reify a word’s presence in popular culture. It can also risk making it uncool. Slang terms inherently run counter to mainstream vocabulary and the lexicon of those in power, but crowning something the word of the year thrusts it further into common parlance. Rizz, used online by Gen Z—and even the next generation, Gen Alpha—has now been pushed into the consciousness of people who read the dictionary (as well as news reports, and newsletters like this one). The word of the year provides a temperature check on how people are using language—or, at least, how the people who work at the dictionary see us using language, Caleb said. But when it comes to a slang term’s cool factor, he said, “I tend to think of it as a gravestone … Here lies rizz.”

Related:

We’re all capable of going “goblin mode.” Why AI doesn’t get slang

Today’s News

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in ​​Moore v. United States, which could have sweeping ramifications on the American tax system. Israeli troops have entered Khan Younis, Hamas’s last major stronghold in Gaza. Tens of thousands of residents have fled amid a deepening humanitarian crisis. The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania testified before the House regarding anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents on their campuses since October 7.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The United Nations climate summit is the one place the countries suffering most from climate change can face down the countries causing it, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Evening Read

Cole Barash

Ammon Bundy Has Disappeared

By Jacob Stern

Two weeks before chaos hit St. Luke’s hospital in Boise, Idaho—before Ammon Bundy showed up with an armed mob and the hospital doors had to be sealed and death threats crashed the phone lines—a 10-month-old baby named Cyrus Anderson arrived in the emergency room.

The boy’s parents, Marissa and Levi, knew something wasn’t right: For months, Cyrus had been having episodes of vomiting that wouldn’t stop. When he arrived in the ER, he weighed just 14 pounds, which put him in the .05th percentile for his age. Natasha Erickson, the doctor who examined him, had seen malnutrition cases like this in textbooks but never in real life. Cyrus’s ribs were clearly visible through his chest. When he threw up, his vomit was bright green.

Erickson hooked the baby up to an IV and a feeding tube, and he slowly started to gain weight. But Levi and Marissa were anxious to leave. They were members of an anti-government activist network that Bundy, the scion of America’s foremost far-right family, had founded, and they shared his distrust of medical and public-health authorities.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

If Trump Wins: A MAGA judiciary A new era of open defiance An existential problem in the search for alien life

Culture Break

Mike Wilson / IFC Films

Listen. Forty years ago, scientists turned the tide in the roach wars. Why doesn’t anyone remember? Daniel Engber and Hanna Rosin discuss in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

Watch. A new documentary about the pioneering sex researcher Shere Hite (in theaters) points to the barriers that women face when writing candidly about intimacy and power.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Strange as this might be to say of the only American president found legally liable for sexual abuse, the only leader of the free world accused of dangling a TV gig in front of a porn performer seemingly as an enticement for sex, the only commander in chief to publicly denigrate the sexual attractiveness of both Heidi Klum (“no longer a 10”) and Angelina Jolie (“not a great beauty”), I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway. “When it comes to the women who are not only dutifully but lovingly catering to his desires,” the philosopher Kate Manne wrote in her 2017 book, Down Girl, “what’s to hate?”

The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function. The more than 25 women who have accused Trump of sexual assault or misconduct (which he has denied), and the countless more who have endured public vitriol and threats to their life after being targeted by him, have all been punished either for challenging him or for denying him what he fundamentally believed was his due.

[Read: What E. Jean Carroll means for #MeToo]

At the micro level, Trump’s misogyny can be almost comical, in an absurdist sort of way, like the time in 1994 when he fretted over whether his new infant daughter would inherit her mother’s breasts, or when he tweeted to Cher in 2012, “I promise not to talk about your massive plastic surgeries that didn’t work.” On a larger scale, the legislative and cultural shifts he fostered during his four years in the White House are so drastic that they’re hard to fully parse. Until 2022, women and pregnant people had the constitutional right to an abortion; now, thanks to Trump’s remade Supreme Court, abortion is unavailable or effectively banned in about a third of states. The MAGA Republican Party is ever more of a boy’s club: All 14 representatives who announced bids to become House speaker after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy were men; the victor, Mike Johnson, has blamed Roe v. Wade in the past for depriving the country of “able-bodied workers” to prop up the American economy. Online and off, old-fashioned sexists and trollish provocateurs alike have been emboldened by Trump’s ability to say grotesque things without consequences.

Trump’s glee in smacking down women has filtered into every aspect of our culture. If, as the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote, “ideology is not acquired by thought but by breathing the haunted air,” then Trump has helped radicalize swaths of a generation essentially through poisonous fumes. He didn’t create the manosphere, the fetid corner of the internet devoted to sending women back to the Stone Age. But he elevated some of its most noxious voices into the mainstream, and vindicated their worst prejudices. “I’m in a state of exuberance that we now have a President who rates women on a 1–10 scale in the same way that we do,” wrote the former self-described pickup artist Roosh V on his website shortly after the election.

By now, misogyny has bled into virtually every part of the internet. TikTok clips featuring Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer and accused rapist and human trafficker who has said that women should bear some personal responsibility for their sexual assaults and frequently derides women as “hoes,” have been viewed billions of times. (Tate has denied the charges against him.) In 2021, before Elon Musk bought Twitter and oversaw a spike in misogynistic and abusive content—not to mention reinstating the accounts of both Trump and Tate—the Tesla entrepreneur and men’s-rights icon tweeted that he was going to inaugurate a new college called the Texas Institute of Technology & Science (TITS). Boys on social media are being inundated with messaging that the only qualities worth prizing in women are sexual desirability and submission—a worldview that aligns perfectly with Trump’s. Misogyny, as my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in Slate in 2016, is the one ideology Trump has never changed, his one unwavering credo. Seeking to dominate others with his supposed sexual prowess and loudly professing disgust at women he doesn’t desire has been his modus operandi for decades. Any woman who challenges him is “a big, fat pig,” “a dog,” a “horseface.”

What would four more years of Trump mean for women? It’s hard to conclude that Trump was moderated by the presence of his daughter in the West Wing, exactly—or, for that matter, by any of the advisers who thought they could temper his worst instincts before they ended up fleeing in droves. But what’s most chilling about a possible second Trump presidency is that he would certainly now be unchecked. The advisers who remain are the ones who bolster his darker impulses. It was Trump’s adviser Jason Miller, Axios’s Mike Allen reported, who psyched him up between segments of his 2023 CNN town hall as he became more and more aggressive toward the moderator, Kaitlan Collins. “Are you ready? Can I talk? Do you mind?” Trump jeered at her. Anyone who’s ever witnessed an abusive relationship could instantly recognize the tone.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Women Will Be Targets.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Younger workers are increasingly willing to talk to their colleagues about what they earn.

This year, the 29-year-old Ghanaian American singer-songwriter Amaarae took, to use a technical term, a big swing. With a voice of feathery beauty and songs blending R&B, hip-hop, rock, and Afropop, she had already earned buzz for her 2020 debut album, The Angel You Don’t Know. On the follow-up, Fountain Baby, released this past June, she pushed the scope and detail of her music, channeling the dirty swagger of Rihanna and the global futurism of Missy Elliott. Amaarae cheekily boasted in a behind-the-scenes video that she’d soon have a “10-times platinum, worldwide hit,” adding, “I’m about to be on my Taylor Swift shit.”

So when I met with her at a hotel restaurant during New York Fashion Week in September, I was unsurprised to see her looking the part of a pop star. She showed up in chunky biker boots (vintage Chanel) and a red-lettered tank top emblazoned with her own slogan: SEXY, HOT & SLIGHTLY PSYCHOTIC. That she was ambitious was obvious—but I wanted to know how ambitious. What were her career dreams?

“I would love to go into soundtrack curation,” she told me, adding that she adores animated films. “If I ever have kids, just thinking about the future, it would be a more relaxed kind of job.” She brought up the Rock’s voice-acting role in Moana, a movie his own daughter watches. “That’s something that he can really share with her,” she said. “I think that’d be so fire.”

This was not exactly the response I’d been expecting. It sounded like a plan for retirement, not world domination. Amaarae made Fountain Baby with hopes of becoming “as big as Beyoncé,” she said, “but over time, I’ve started to realign those goals.” The album is the most acclaimed musical release of 2023 according to Metacritic, but it hasn’t generated major hits or made her a household name. She’s giving the album “12 to 18 months” to “reach the masses,” but she’s also thinking about what’s next.

Such practicality might seem antithetical to the bad-bitch persona that she and so many young performers clearly seek to embody. But part of the modern hustle is not getting too attached to one idea of success. A generation of musicians, raised studying popular culture through screens, has arrived in the public eye with fully formed aesthetics and a smart sense for how to play the music industry’s games. Our era of twitchy attention spans and fractured audiences, however, has made the very concept of stardom fleeting and hard to define.

One of the big storylines of the year in music has in fact been a dearth of new voices to unite the masses. In August, Billboard reported that record-label employees were feeling “depressed” about their inability to break artists in a big way; though social media regularly vaults unknown talents into the spotlight, the oversaturation of the music marketplace makes it tough to build on the momentum from a fluke hit. Also in August, The New York Times ran a much-discussed piece about pop’s “middle class.” The designation referred to singers such as Troye Sivan and Charli XCX: Their sounds and attitude evoke the likes of Madonna or Michael Jackson, but their followings are about the size of a good indie band.

So far, Amaarae is another example of that class. Two years ago, a remix of her song “Sad Gurlz Luv Money”—from her debut album—sparked a TikTok dance trend involving smooth arm movements and wobbling knees. But she told me she generally finds her era’s music to be uninspiring: Precious few artists seem to be taking risks anymore. When recording her second album, she thought a lot about Britney Spears’s Blackout and the oeuvre of Ye (formerly Kanye West)—landmark mass-market entertainments of the 2000s that oozed provocation and polish. Her vision for Fountain Baby: “It’s cinematic, but it’s still hip-hop.”

She likened the album’s creation process to reaching the famed “10,000 hours” benchmark for mastery of a trade. Amaarae had been making music since she was a teenager, learning from YouTube tutorials and using ripped software. But she wanted to take charge of the professionalized, collaborative process that record-industry titans use to create hits. At songwriting camps in Los Angeles and in Ghana, she assembled teams of musicians to throw around ideas. In one session, the R&B veteran Babyface taught her about his method of counting syllables for each line of lyrics—a lesson in rigor that led her to rewrite what had been a more-or-less-finished album.

[Read: The age of pleasure is here]

Far from feeling committee-tested or formulaic, the resulting album is ornate, employing intricate rhythms, Arabic scales, and diverse sounds: harp, emo guitars, sampled gunshots. The most distinctive ingredient is her high, soft coo, which tends to be described as a “baby voice.” In conversation, Amaarae speaks in a husky drawl, punctuating her sentences with “bro.” But when singing, she plays a character—that of “a very naughty child that shouldn’t say certain things,” as she put it to me.

This happy embrace of artificiality is part of the point of the music. One of the album’s standout tracks, “Counterfeit,” repurposes a clanging beat that Pharrell and Chad Hugo created for the rap duo Clipse in 2006. Amaarae first ripped the beat from YouTube, then enlisted a Congolese band to re-create it on traditional drums and kora. To write the song’s lyrics, she asked Maesu, one of her songwriting partners, to come up with lines about breast augmentation. (She added gleefully that her collaborators, mostly “tough guys,” allow themselves to get “super feminine” in the creation process.)

For all of the album’s eclecticism, however, she didn’t want it marketed as anything but a collection of general-interest bangers. “Fountain Baby is a pop album above all else,” read an info sheet sent to journalists. “It should not be pigeonholed solely as an ‘Afrobeats’ project.” Amaarae was born in the Bronx, and since her youth has split her time between the U.S. and Ghana. But early in her career, media coverage tended to focus on the Ghana portion of her biography, which missed the point of what she’s doing: “I think that African music right now is popular music,” Amaarae said.

She mentioned “Calm Down,” a collaboration between Selena Gomez and the Nigerian singer Rema that’s been one of the biggest hits of the year. A few nights before we’d talked, it won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Afrobeats. The category was brand new, and some Afrobeats fans online expressed annoyance that the accolade went to a song anchored by an American celebrity. But Amaarae said she saw the win as important, even though it revealed a “necessary evil”: “If you want to break into [the American mainstream], you’ve got to go and get the pop stars.”

She alluded to pressures from her label to find a pop star of her own to team up with. “I’m like, Bro, give it time,” she said. “I’m making it a real point to say that I am going to make one, or multiple, of these songs hits on my own.” Every day, she was noticing more reviews and more comments about her music online. “Slowly but surely, it’s spreading,” she said. (A month after we talked, she had her second TikTok hit with the Fountain Baby track “Angels in Tibet,” which inspired more dancing.)

As we got up to leave the restaurant, a young man sitting at the bar stopped us. Eyes wide, he showed Amaarae his phone: He’d been listening to Fountain Baby on the way in, and he had tickets to see her on tour next year. Outside on the sidewalk, she told me that this sort of encounter was becoming more common. “It’s kinda throwing me a little bit,” she said. “This is what I mean about the slow burn.” I said farewell and turned to leave—just as another stranger approached, looking starstruck.

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