When I was very young, I saw the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact. In the movie, a family had a dolphin pool in their living room! The dolphin swims over for its morning treat as if it were a dog bounding out of bed for its Milk-Bone*. If this is what we’ll get in 2010, I thought at the time, who knows what sublime wonders await us in 2020! Alas, dolphins sharing our living rooms never did pan out. (Not yet, anyway.) I could scarcely imagine that we’d instead have a reality-TV star for a president, tweeting about how he hates New York. (“Define reality TV,” I would have demanded. “What’s tweeting? Does he hate New York because it actually became that prison Snake Plissken had to rescue him from?”)
Despite the ways the present time has defied expectations, reaching the year 2020 seems slightly monumental. It may simply be the surreal number: 2020. (I’m reminded of Conan O’Brien returning to the bit “In the Year 2000” long after the turn of the millennium, as if to acknowledge how weird it is that we’re living in what for so many of us was the inconceivable “future.”)
To mark the occasion, we put out a call to our contributors. Our request was simple:
Rather than offering our readers lists of the ten best movies or albums or books of the past year, we’re asking if you’d be willing to contribute a list of ten instances of anything from the past ten years: Ten favorite discoveries about your neighborhood, say, or ten moments in podcasts that made you hit the ‘back-15-seconds’ button. Ten words you discovered. Ten cultural experiences you’re thankful for. Ten articles of clothing. Ten times you changed your mind. Anything!
What you’ll find in this package are the responses of a generous bunch who, in spite of holiday commitments, wrote down what mattered to them over the past decade.
We’ll be publishing these lists all week, from December 31th through January 3rd, hinge dates turning our teens into our twenties. We hope you enjoy what you read. We hope things get better.
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[*The main character of 2010 also does some computing on what looks like a Macintosh Classic, on the beach, which he has set up in the sand. The production crew’s imagination only went so far, apparently.]
