In this week’s Comment, Rebecca Mead reviews the unnameable decade that’s about to come to an end. She recalls meaningful moments (“the election of a certified intellectual as President, not to mention an African-American one”) as well as more dubious milestones: “small plates, Bump for the iPhone, Sarah Palin, Chinese drywall, jeggings?”
We asked New Yorker contributors to select a moment that represents the decade, and to make a prediction for the teens (or whatever we’ll end up calling the decade to come). Some chose multiple moments; some preferred not to prognosticate; some sent pictures instead of words.
JON LEE ANDERSON
A moment: July 2, 2003—George W. Bush saying, “Bring ‘em on,” goading the insurgents then attacking U.S. troops in Iraq, where sixty-five soldiers had died.
A prediction: A regional conflict in Latin America, sparked by a war between Venezuela and Colombia. Also, a new Iranian revolution—or more likely, a civil war.
JOHN CASSIDY
A moment: Standing on West Broadway and watching the second (North) tower of the World Trade Center collapse in on itself.
A prediction: China will suffer a speculative bust.
JOHN COLAPINTO
A moment: The moment that sums up the last decade was when the glasses of champagne were poured in giddy celebration at 11:59 pm on December 31, 1999, and all those pretty bubbles raced to the top of the elegant flutes then burst and disappeared with the toasting of the new millennium—a ghostly vanishing that symbolically prefigured the great bubble bursts of the ten years that would follow.
A prediction: One long, lingering hangover. And a huge spike in Kindle downloads of “The Decline of the West.” (Although I hope I’m wrong!)
STEVE COLL
A moment: A suicide bomber taking his own life, and Benazir Bhutto’s, after an election rally outside a park in Rawalpindi.
A prediction: Jazz will be cool and creative again, but older listeners will claim that the new music isn’t as authentic as early Miles.
WILLIAM FINNEGAN
A long moment vaingloriously dubbed Shock and Awe—the invasion of Iraq. The violence and hatred unleashed were the defining debacle of the decade.
A prediction: David Foster Wallace’s prediction about creeping corporate sponsorship comes true. See you in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar.
FRANCES FITZGERALD
A moment: My e-mail address was hijacked by Nigerians, and I only got it back because my husband was able to charm a call-center employee in New Delhi with his knowledge of Indian politics.
A prediction: By 2020, there will be two dozen virtual countries with virtual governments, virtual historical monuments, and virtual people who will answer all queries of any kind. All these countries will be members of the United Nations, and although most will be populated with helpful truth-tellers, you will have to watch out for those peopled with obfuscators and those prone to virtual military or corporate coups.
SASHA FRERE-JONES
A moment: In January of 2000, I used Napster for the first time. I downloaded the entire catalog of a band I knew only by name. When it turned out that I didn’t care for the music, I was oddly relieved. I hadn’t robbed the band of sale because there never would have been a sale if buying blind was my only option.
Then I downloaded some music I liked, a pair of songs that I played repeatedly. My moral workaround for this was a conviction—strong then and perhaps embarrassing now—that I was dealing with low-resolution copies. An MP3 contains only a fraction of the information embodied in a master recording. How would anybody ever mistake an MP3 for the thing itself? Who would settle for a Xerox if they fell in love with an original?
The next day, I thought the MP3s sounded pretty good.
A prediction: Musicians will keep making recordings.
TAD FRIEND
A moment: President Bush arriving in his unnecessary flight suit aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, and announcing “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Behind him was the famous “Mission Accomplished” sign. Earlier that same day, Donald Rumsfeld declared an end to “major combat activity” in Afghanistan.
A prediction: Alice Munro will win an overdue Nobel Prize.
MALCOLM GLADWELL
A moment: Dara Torres medalling in the 2008 Olympics at forty, giving hope to all radically aging athletes everywhere.
A prediction: Someone will make the Olympic team at fifty.
DANA GOODYEAR
A moment: First Lady Michelle Obama plants the first vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s World War II victory garden. An expression of the new food politics, organic and local.
A prediction: A Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of gay marriage.
PHILIP GOUREVITCH
The big moment of the last lousy decade: Bush v. Gore.
A prediction: more war.
These things have one virtue: they rhyme.
LISA KERESZI
The morning of September 11, 2001, as seen from my rooftop in East Williamsburg.
“For Rent” signs in an empty arcade on 42nd Street, 2004.
Skee-ball sign at Coney Island, 2002.
Fourth of July at Coney Island, 2003.
Fence with graffiti in Cocoa Beach, Florida, 2001.
Abandoned condos in New Haven, Connecticut, 2006.
Estate sale in West Haven, Connecticut, 2008.
Images of foreclosures in and around New Haven, Connecticut, 2007-09
ELIZABETH KOLBERT
A moment: In December, 2005, the Bush Administration demanded that NASA remove its temperature data from the web. (The data showed that the year was going to be the warmest on record.) To me, that moment pretty much sums things up. We spent the 2000s-or whatever they are called - amassing an amazing body of information on earth system science. Then we systematically ignored it.
A prediction: They’re going to be warmer than the 2000s.
JILL LEPORE
A moment: A day last October when, I swear, six out of every seven stories in the New York Times was one version or another of the end is near: “Ex-Goldman Sachs Exec Buys Trousers at Consignment Shop; Dickers over Mark-up.”
A prediction: Historians aren’t supposed to prophesy. Didn’t they, like, banish Thucydides for that? So, out on a limb, here: Round about the middle of the decade, the Archduke Ferdinand will see his Google ranking skyrocket, Jude Law will play him in the film, and Jake Gyllenhaal will be sore about that.
LARISSA MacFARQUHAR
A moment: corpses and rapes and thousands trapped in the convention center in New Orleans.
A prediction: more water.
BEN McGRATH
Not so much a moment as an idea that was born at the start of the decade and died at the end: the rise and fall of Patio Man.
A prediction: In the decade to come, Derek Jeter will be exposed as a human being not unlike Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods, and, with this, the collective (and healthy) disillusionment will be complete.
REBECCA MEAD
Summation: “I’m the decider.”
A prediction: Social networking for preschoolers (“Jake is…in the playground, with his babysitter”; “Zoe is…at the library, with her mom”)
EVAN OSNOS
A moment: The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics combined beauty and vulgarity and left no doubt about the scale of China’s ambitions in the world.
A prediction: You’ll soon be driving a Chinese car.
GEORGE PACKER
A moment: The line that stretched along three blocks of downtown Brooklyn, with people waiting-unnecessarily, it turned out-to give blood, September 12, 2001.
Another moment: George W. Bush presenting the Medal of Freedom to L. Paul Bremer III, Tommy Franks, and George Tenet, December 14, 2004.
NICK PAUMGARTEN
A moment: For the Oz Decade, any instance of fakery might do, or hardly do at all: Madoff, yellowcake, Mission Accomplished, Balloon Boy, liar loans, Barry Bonds.
A prediction: The same will hold for the next decade. I predict another ten years of baloney.
ROBERT POLIDORI
A moment: Here are some images of Dubai which I took in 2006. (Courtesy of the BinLaden Group.)
ALEX ROSS
A moment: “I stand alone,” the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang, on a December night in 2004, in the closing minutes of Benjamin Britten’s “Phaedra” at the New York Philharmonic. Indeed she did. She was a singer of uncanny spiritual power, and there won’t be another like her.
A prediction: This is perhaps more a wish than a prediction, but I believe that in the coming decade several ambitious young composers will finally break the stranglehold of the past and restore new music to the center of the classical world.
PETER SCHJELDAHL
A moment: 2006: A pretty good modern painting, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,” by Gustav Klimt, sells for $135 million.
A prediction: 2016: A really great modern painting sells for a fraction of that amount.
JUDITH THURMAN
A moment: Googling myself.
A prediction: Printed books are obsolete, arty kids collect and treasure them like vinyl, old geezers who refuse to tweet go off to a mountaintop and wander through the forest reciting the books they have “become.”
CALVIN TOMKINS
A moment: George W. Bush’s aerial flyover of drowning New Orleans, in 2005: the definitive image of arrogant incompetence.
Another moment: Damien Hirst’s 2007 “For the Love of God,” a diamond-encrusted human skull priced at $100 million: the definitive image of an art world bereft of irony.
JEFFREY TOOBIN
A moment: December 12, 2000-a date that will live in infamy. It was the day that the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, a shameful moment in the Court’s history and an inauspicious beginning of an inauspicious presidency.
A prediction: The television ratings for Tiger Woods’s next golf tournament will be very, very high.
ALEC WILKINSON
A (mostly private) landmark: The death of William Maxwell, in July of 2000, removing from the world a learned and genteel intelligence-graceful, kind, and capacious, leaving a certain belief about writing and its possibilities largely unrepresented.
A prediction: A desire for narrative, which is coherence, will return. People will soon grow tired of hearing every thought in everyone’s head and look to those people and sources who know how to select from life’s thousand and one things and tell stories, whether actual or imagined.
