video Exactly ten years ago, we were recovering from ringing in the new year millennium in style -- with Prince's 1999 song ironically cued up throughout our homemade party mixed tapes (burning CDs and iPods were not yet on the scene.) But this wasn't just any New Year's Eve -- this was the night when we escaped the ghosts in the digital machine who threatened to get their collective revenge on a civilization grown lazy with technological advances. How did they plan to attack? Via the mysterious and scary computer glitch known as Y2K! (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...)

video We're less than two months from the end of the decade and up to now, the media has been suspiciously quiet about it. Maybe it's going to be a surprise party, but it wouldn't have been unreasonable to believe that the retrospective coverage would have been wall-to-wall for the entire second half of the year. There's always December! (more...)