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The "millennial generation" has been getting a bad rap in popular culture in recent years. Millennials, roughly defined as people born in the 1980s and '90s, frequently see themselves depicted as entitled, coddled and narcissistic.

But many — including millennials themselves — dispute those characterizations. Young adults today are tolerant, civic-minded and entrepreneurial, they note, and are thriving despite entering into a tight job market, often with significant amounts of student loan debt.

In an Oxford-style debate for Intelligence Squared U.S., two teams recently faced off over myths, realities and prospects for young adults while considering the motion "Millennials Don't Stand A Chance."

Before the debate, the audience at New York's Kaufman Music Center voted 18 percent in favor of the motion and 47 percent against. After the debate, 38 percent agreed with the motion, while 52 percent disagreed, making the team arguing that "Millennials Don't Have A Chance" the winners of this particular debate.

Those debating were:

More From The Debate

A friend of mine grumbled on Facebook recently about the phenomenon of people moaning in despair over April's weather. There's often a cold snap around this time, she pointed out. There's often unpleasant rain. There's often unpredictability.

It's true, of course. The delicate dance of when to put away the warm clothes and take out the short sleeves must be repeated every year, and then re-repeated in reverse the first time you go outside in early September and feel that the air has become slightly less hospitable than it was yesterday. It's true that we shouldn't act surprised. It's true that we should look at our calendars, nod sagely, and say, "Right on time."

But somehow, we manage to summon every April the impatience and restlessness that can only mean one thing: we are lusting for spring in our hearts.

It really is remarkable, though. It should be old by now, but it isn't. It's amazing. I literally allow myself to be amazed by the effect of the earth going around the sun. It happened again! I think. My part of the globe is once again getting more direct sunlight more of the time! It's as if I feared maybe it wouldn't. Maybe this would be the year that we chugged to a stop and it stayed January forever. Or worse, February. I should, in theory, be no more impressed by the arrival of spring than by the arrival of morning. I happen to have a huge window through which I can watch the sun come up, and I often do at certain times of year. But I don't have feelings about it.

I have feelings about spring. Every spring, I look forward to that first day that I can drive with the window down, even though I've been driving with the window down since I was a little girl. (I recommend accompanying this trip with the New Pornographers' record Mass Romantic.) Every spring, there's that one day. That one day, when you turn the corner. You hit the farmer's market in a shirt you've washed and dried a hundred times until it's fuzzy and pilling. The tables are crammed with berries that are a little early but they are there, and you ease past somebody slathering sunblock on a kid in a stroller. You take your berries home, but you eat several of them in the car on the way there, because hey – they're grown without pesticides, right?

It's true: We shouldn't grouse about the way winter hangs around. (Even though, in many places, this winter was worse than most.) We should be used to it. It starts to get better, and then it rains, it gets cold again, and we feel suspended and impatient, snapped back and forth between cold and warm. But all that angst is just part of the dance. We talk about the bad weather in part because it preserves that feeling of that one day. It's going to happen soon here.

I sing "Spring, Spring, Spring" from Seven Brides For Seven Brothers to myself at least once every year. Just because. (Well, just because it's pegged to spring, while the other major kicky musical number about animals mating seasonally is specifically pegged to June, and I can never wait that long.)

Every Monday night, TV gives itself over to a mass of preening, posturing men, indulging in petty backbiting. Some are decked out in elaborate costumes, most are presenting idealized versions of the human form, and all are angling for a shot at a singular, prized accessory.

Also, RuPaul's Drag Race is on.

To compare WWE's Monday Night Raw to RuPaul's Drag Race may seem like an easy punch line to those who dismiss both as lowbrow entertainment pitched to niche audiences. But those who indulge in both (almost assuredly a very small sliver of that particular Venn diagram) know better than to reject the notion out of hand. While that opening description focused largely on surface similarities, that's only the beginning of the resemblances. Dig more deeply, and you'll find that not only are the two shows comparable, but they're essentially one and the same.

The sports-entertainment industry and reality-competition-television complex both exist wholly in the realm of massaged reality. While scripted in advance, Raw remains a far more malleable property than your typical scripted series. The WWE churns out five hours of traditional network programming each week, but storylines remain fluid, with emergency rewrites happening at the last minute, if necessary.

The most notable example of late came in the aftermath of the Royal Rumble in January. Fan outcry was so vehement in the wake of the pay-per-view event that no less than Vince McMahon, chairman and CEO of the WWE, reportedly demanded an 11th-hour rewrite of the following night's Raw. That the ultimate outcome of the program is predetermined serves as the gist of the argument to those who dismiss professional wrestling as fake. But such a restrictive point of view misses the fact that while the scripted storyline provides a skeletal frame for the performers to work within, the matches themselves provide the true heart of the show. To watch a high caliber match is to watch tremendously skilled athletes move with seamless and acrobatic grace in an elaborate and largely non-choreographed dance. Beneath that garish exterior is a core of quiet elegance, plainly evident to any who care to look.

Balancing elegance and garishness is the hallmark of any good drag queen as well, and the queens featured on Drag Race do it better than any. The show itself operates under the rules of any reality television show, by trading traditional writers for story producers. (Meaning the show crafts the narrative after it films, rather than before.) And while the composition may differ, the song remains the same: Strings get pulled, plot gets finessed, but the true entertainment comes not from the story, but from the element of performance. Drag Race, too, showcases seasoned, dedicated performers at the height of their skills. The queens see drag as a passion and work to elevate it to art.

Both shows contain the shadows of ancient entertainment forms: large groups of men coming together to put on elaborate, out of the ordinary performances, many of them performing as women. From ancient Greek theater to Japanese Kabuki to Shakespeare, it's not hard to see the trickle-down effect that's led to a single night of programming featuring men acting out the most extreme archetypes of masculine and feminine with big, broad strokes. Conflict need addressing on Raw? Resolution most likely comes with a steel chair to the back, if not a choke slam through a table, if not both. Spat brewing on Drag Race? Someone's almost certainly been disparaging someone else's sewing skills. Or makeup. Or wig. One man's steel chair is another queen's sharp tongue.

At times, the shows present almost like a lazy stand-up comedy set: "See, men act like this, but ladies act like this." The men—wrestlers—snort and snarl at each other, so aggressive that it's inevitable all conflict resolves physically. Often, the most winning are the smoothest talkers, who bring finely honed skills to the microphone and cut the best promos. Most of these men are simultaneously oiled up and watered down with images meticulously fashioned, worked and then reworked. Wrestlers are coiffed and costumed and spray-tanned and chiseled within an inch of their lives. Tradition dictates that anything less than a veritable Adonis must be relegated to a bit part. (For some viewers, this isn't such a marked difference from how the world already operates.)

The women, meanwhile—the drag queens in performance mode—are all vivacious, good time girls, pretty and polished and perfect. Bodies are tight; hair impeccable. The interactions are predictably catty, with girls throwing shade and proving beyond a doubt that this is not RuPaul's Best Friend Race. Queens fine-tune their personas through years of trial and error. ("You better work" no doubt echoing through their minds.)The girls that stand tallest are those whose minds work the fastest. Pretty will get you far, but an acid wit will keep your frenemies where you want them.

Such are the surface observations of shows centered on what it is to create, maintain, and make an art out of your own gender facade. Each world, wrestling and drag alike, contains a multitude of characters and character types. In drag, queens often identify within a certain type, be it comedic, camp, pageant, etc., and no single is dominant. Fishy queens (that is, queens that resemble women to the extent that their true gender is confusing or "fishy") don't perform substantially better than more niche queens when it comes to taking home the crown.

Similarly, at least of late, Raw has moved away from the thought that only the manliest of men can dominate the field. The driving story in the WWE for the last nine months has been that of an ascendant wrestler named Daniel Bryan. His storyline represents a struggle between what the WWE has been — a place where wrestlers are bred (no, really) and bigger is better — and what the WWE could be, which is a place where talent and technique count for more and pretty packaging counts for less. Bryan's rise was fueled by an organic and passionate affinity from WWE fans at large, and his story came to a climax at WrestleMania XXX, a night in which he triumphed over two former WWE champions and one current champion to win the belt(s). (There are two. It's a long story.)

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Ginny Weasley, the freckly, flame-haired girl who later marries Harry Potter, grows up to be a sports journalist, according to new writing from J.K. Rowling on the website Pottermore. (Login required.) The stories are Ginny's dispatches from the 2014 Quidditch World Cup for the magical newspaper The Daily Prophet. "Not a single Quaffle thrown, not a single Snitch caught, but the 427th Quidditch World Cup is already mired in controversy," she writes. "Magizoologists have congregated in the desert to contain the mayhem and Healers have attended more than 300 crowd members suffering from shock, broken bones and bites."

In Vanity Fair, Ian McEwan talks about having dinner with Salman Rushdie, who had a fatwa out against him: "I remember standing the next morning with Salman in the country kitchen, a gray English morning, and he was the lead item on the BBC — another Middle East figure saying he too would condemn him to death. It was a very sad moment — standing buttering toast and listening to that awful message on the radio."

James Salter remembers Peter Matthiessen, the writer and naturalist who died earlier this month: "His illness was private. It lasted more than a year, and the treatment was difficult. During it, as he became weaker, with his characteristic determination he wrote a final book, just published this past week, 'In Paradise.' He died at home, and his wife, his son Alex, and Zen family washed his body as in ancient times."

The editorial director of Ecco, Lee Boudreaux, is leaving the HarperCollins imprint to launch "Boudreaux," her own imprint at Little, Brown. She told Publisher's Weekly that the imprint will allow her to "discover the kind of electrifying and unexpected voices I've grown to treasure."

Man Booker winner Eleanor Catton writes about the process of finding inspiration for a novel: "Creative influence can have a positive or a negative charge, either imitative ('I want to try that!') or defiant ('I want to see that done differently'). Both kinds of influence are vital for the health of an idea. Too defiant, and the idea will be shrill; too imitative, and the idea will be safe. For me, the moment when these two charges first come together — when I connect, imaginatively, something that I love as a reader with something that I long for as a reader — is the moment the idea for a story is born."