the aughts Wow. That is what you think when you look through some of the 667 reader images the NYT selected to showcase this decade, and impart its events and its impact. It's an extremely meta feature, summing up the inexorable switch to interactivity of the last ten years — All The News That's Fit To Print used to be about picking what readers should see and know, and now readers are not only deciding for themselves, they're making the content themselves, too — but also, on its face, is just an amazing collection of images that are beautiful even when they are heartbreaking (photos of September 11th smoke against a blue, blue sky will always have a terrible beauty to them) and far-flung in their origin, subject matter and the stories they have to tell. (more...)

the aughts This new decade has snuck up on us. It's mid-December and only just now has the media world seemed to have awoken to the fact that, wow, we're about to enter a new decade. I myself had not even realized it until I got an email from Newsweek inviting me to participate in their end-of-decade package. What a difference from ten years ago, when a millennium was drawing to a close and we lived in fear of the havoc to be wrought by Y2K even while we were partying like it was 1999. (I was dreaming when I wrote that.) By contrast, this year has been so crazy that just chronicling the madness of 2009 has seemed like more than enough work, let alone reflect on the past decade. But part of the import of a passing decade being so overlooked lies to in how un-unified it seemed. The 90s were a big deal because they were so different from the 80s and so different from the 70s. And when we left the 90s behind, we left them for...what? (more...)

The Aughts As writers scramble for their last-ditch efforts to name this decade, attention has landed on Time Magazine for their proposed name: "The Decade From Hell." But what's more interesting is to consider what Time suggested - and today's editors subsequently neglected to revisit - in their first issue of the decade. (more...)