There’s a temporal side effect of the elongated COVID crisis, a sort of dislocation of time. Our calendar memories slip up: The marker “last year” has lost its meaning, because 2020 is less last year than a lost year. Twenty years ago, 9/11 caused a related kind of dislocation. The sheer impact of the event subsumed both the years immediately before it and the years after with its long shadow. For those of us who remember the day, who witnessed its terror, it can be hard to summon what else happened around it.
The recent past is full of blind spots. History happens in an instant, but its effects take time to settle, and new generations come up who live and dream by different memories. The pull of the noisy present encourages inadvertent (or willful) amnesia, while the long-term passage of time acts as a filter. In a certain sense it’s easier to see clearly events that happened 50 or 100 years ago than those of two decades ago.
FROM THE VAULT Some of our favorite covers from 1999 to 2001.
So we dedicate this issue to the turn of the century—how the years 1999–2001 set us on the path to today. The roots of contemporary power and influence are hiding there in plain sight. On January 1, 2000, Boris Yeltsin made a surprise announcement, resigning the presidency of Russia six months early and naming a 47-year-old former KGB apparatchik, Vladimir Putin, as his chosen successor, in advance of free elections that were, in retrospect, a mere formality. In December of that year, 537 votes cast in Florida plus one controversial Supreme Court decision determined that George W. Bush would be the 43rd president of the United States. One of these men recently presided over the near-fatal poisoning of the leader of his country’s opposition party; the other makes oil paintings on a ranch in Texas while the war he began, the longest in American history, shudders to an end. Arguably, these two men did more to shape our current world order than any other individuals in this century so far.
It’s not just geopolitics, either. As I write this letter, I am 400 pages deep into the galley of a forthcoming novel, Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen. The novel that made him a household name, The Corrections, was published 20 years ago this September. A fourth Matrix movie arrives this year, directed by Lana Wachowski, as does a Sopranos prequel movie, written by David Chase—both harking back to game-changing originals from 1999. The princess of pop, Britney Spears, released her first two albums in 1999 and 2000; they remain two of the best-selling albums of all time, and yet this year’s news has established Spears as a tragic inversion of the sexually empowered 21st-century woman, allegedly stripped of agency over her own body. Two decades ago, Björk wore a swan dress on the Oscars red carpet; this June, Dior sent a swan dress down the runway.
Sean Combs, the artist and entrepreneur who is also an avatar of how potently those two identities can combine, creates his own eras, and the turn of the century saw his transformation from Puff Daddy to P. Diddy. It wasn’t just a name change, as Tressie McMillan Cottom observes in her brilliant cover story, but an inflection point marking his success in taking hip-hop iconography to scale. “He understood hip-hop as a lifestyle at a time before ‘influencer’ had entered our cultural lexicon,” she writes. How his next era (with corresponding name change, this time to “Love”) will land depends in part on his ability to evolve, but also on the evolving conditions around him—changing views about social responsibility, about contesting the grip of capitalism, about the viability of the hustle.
We will remember the COVID-19 crisis and the systemic failures it exposed as propelling us to a crossroads, just as 9/11 did. Twenty years from now, what will we say about how we emerged from it? Will we be able to see the opportunities for reframing our culture and our politics, and act on them? Can we get a jump on revealing our blind spots? This issue delves into the past, not just to remind us of what we’ve lived through—and what we live with—but to sharpen our focus on what lies ahead.
— Behind the Scenes of Anthony Bourdain’s Iconic Nude Portrait
— Will TikTok Save the Olympics?
— King Edward VIII, King George VI, and the Rift That Changed History
— New Summer Books for Every Mood
— Jeff Bezos and the Life-Changing Magic of Going to Space
— The Best Next-Gen Face Toners for Balanced Skin
— Jared and Ivanka Have Reportedly Closed on Billionaire Bunker Mansion 2.0
— The Rehabilitation of Prince Edward and Sophie
— From the Archive: How John Kennedy Gracefully Took His Place in History
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