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Do you remember, dear reader, when it was impossible to step into a Starbucks or a mall without getting bombarded by the chorus of “Rolling in the Deep”? That was more or less nine years ago, when Adele was a novelty and the mall was still a place people went to on a regular basis. As someone who spent too much of it on Twitter (e.g., me) might say, what a week this decade has been.
To take stock of the past 10 years, I posed some questions to four Times writers: Farhad Manjoo, Margaret Renkl, Bari Weiss and Jennifer Finney Boylan.
If you could give only one book from this decade to someone in 2009 to read, what would it be and why?
Farhad Manjoo: This one’s easy: “She Said,” by my New York Times colleagues Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey, which chronicles The Times’s painstaking investigation into allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein. Not only is the book a rollicking thriller about a story that would spark a global reckoning; it’s a rollicking thriller about the practice and power of journalism in an era in which journalism and the very idea of truth feels on the rocks. To a 2009er, the book will come as a shock — Harvey was untouchable then — but also a salve: A lot is going to go wrong in the decade ahead. Sometimes it will seem as if nothing matters. But the pursuit of truth still matters; facts, uncovered and aired, still make a difference.
Margaret Renkl: “The Overstory” by Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019, and I can’t help wondering how much old-growth forest might have been saved if we’d had this book a decade ago. “The Overstory” is a novel, neither a work of journalism nor a political screed, and it engages readers on many levels, the way great art inevitably does: emotionally, imaginatively, intellectually. In telling the stories of a disparate group of people who come to care about the fate of our forests, and thus of our planet itself, Mr. Powers manages to make readers care, too. And he packs an immense amount of information into the novel in a way that’s both memorable and powerfully affecting. Forests are oxygen factories and carbon sinks, yes, but they are also living organisms that are crucial to the earth’s very survival. Mr. Powers makes us regard our forests as fellow creatures. Reading “The Overstory” makes us understand that trees are our kin.
Bari Weiss: “The Coddling of the American Mind” was about the “safetyism” culture that has come to dominate college campuses — and how that culture has created a fragile generation of Americans. But I don’t even think the authors, Jonathan Haidt or Gregg Lukianoff, could have foreseen how rapidly the trends they brilliantly diagnosed would leap beyond the quad and into all aspects of American life.
Those trends: That words are violence. That feelings trump facts. That challenges don’t make you stronger, but more traumatized. We — especially, and ironically, the most privileged in our culture — now live in a world permeated by such lies.
To bring back reason and to rebuild a common culture, we need to dismantle those untruths. Reading this book is an essential place to begin.
Jennifer Finney Boylan: The book of the decade was “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan, published in June of 2010. A reader in 2009 would be just as blown away by its inventiveness as a reader 10 or 100 years later, and would have occasion to be optimistic about the state of American literature. Even as the country descends into chaos, great art is being made. A lot of that art, as is the case with “Goon Squad,” is being made by women.
How about a film?
Farhad: I don’t think any filmed experience moved me more than “Boyhood.” This is probably because it played on my obsession this decade: the dumb ephemerality of life. I became a father at the start of the decade, and spent all of it watching my kids’ childhoods fly by; “Boyhood” distilled that feeling of constant loss into two unforgettable hours.
Margaret: Spike Jonze’s film “Her” has haunted me ever since its release in 2013. It’s strange enough that we carry the internet around in our pockets and hear it speaking directly into our ears. How long will it be before the world itself, so beautiful and so fragile, holds no allure for us at all? Walking in the woods, already I pass people on the trail who are listening to their earbuds and walking with their eyes on a screen. “Her,” the story of a man who falls in love with his A.I. assistant, is impossible and all too terribly possible.
Bari: “Get Out” has my vote for the most brilliant movie of the decade. I also loved the recent Korean film “Parasite,” in part because it echoed what I already think of as Jordan Peele’s classic. Both manage to be shocking, disturbing, scary — and somehow, how? — also so very funny.
And I’m going to commit a category error here by mentioning a few plays. For me, they are one of the things that make New York — the perpetually broken subway, calling Bill de Blasio mayor — completely worth it.
In the past weeks I’ve seen “Slave Play,” “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” (all phenomenal) and “The Inheritance” (not so much). For best of the decade: David Cromer’s radical reimagining of “Our Town.” I can still cry thinking of it.
Jennifer: “Watchmen,” the series on HBO that just completed its run in December 2019, is a hard look at American history — and mythology. It captures, breathtakingly, the profound and unhealable racism written into this country’s DNA; it also shows that a woman of color can be a force for justice — and in so doing, it reinvents what we think of when we use the word “superhero.”
What’s something or someone you think changed the course of history for the better, perhaps in ways that are only beginning to be appreciated?
Farhad: Batteries! I think we’re going to get lots of better technologies, especially better transportation tech, thanks to better batteries. Batteries haven’t been getting better at the rate of microprocessors, but we have seen incremental improvements in capacity and cost over the decade, and those improvements will give us lots of more-efficient and safer ways to move around cities.
Margaret: Fake meat isn’t going to turn everyone into a vegan, and it won’t cut down on meat consumption overnight, but it might create a middle way that omnivores find appealing — perhaps even appealing enough to slow the rate at which forests are converted into pastures for livestock. In time it might even mean that pastures are allowed to become forests again.
Bari: The Hong Kong protesters are, literally and figuratively, picking up the flag we have put down. They are at the front lines of the fight for liberty against a Chinese regime that is using technology that promised to make us more free to make human beings more unfree than ever before. They will be remembered not just as heroic, but as prophetic.
Jennifer: Sarah Kate Ellis became the C.E.O. of the L.G.B.T.Q. media advocacy nonprofit Glaad in 2014. At that time, Glaad was teetering on insolvency and irrelevancy. (I know, because I was on its board of directors at the time.) In short order, Ms. Ellis saved that organization and placed it at the forefront of the civil rights movement for queer people. You can’t underestimate the impact of Glaad: So many straight and cis people form their opinions about L.G.B.T.Q. Americans from television and film and other media. Ms. Ellis has helped change the stories we tell about queer Americans. These were once stories about mere “tolerance”; today they are something more like celebration.
What about something that changed history for the worse? (Besides the 2016 election and the fallout of the 2007-08 financial crisis.)
Farhad: Tribalism fed by social networks. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand people who aren’t in your circle; we are actively divorcing ourselves from people who don’t share our experiences. This will end badly.
Margaret: I agree with Farhad. Social media has made it too easy to forget that people are more than their political opinions. Engaging with our fellow human beings on many levels, and not just a political level, is our only hope for finding enough common ground to move together toward something better. And right now we’re in desperate need of something better.
Bari: I don’t think nearly enough attention has been paid to the loss of religion and how it is transforming us. The tribalism Farhad and Margaret rightly criticize is deeply connected to the fact that we are religious animals. In the absence of God we’ll look to politics. Or crystals.
Jennifer: This trend really began with the election of Ronald Reagan, but I think nothing’s been more harmful to our democracy than the belief that government cannot be a force for good. Grover Norquist, the little dear, once wished that government could be reduced “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” There’s nothing more un-American than hatred of our own government, and yet it has somehow become a sacred belief for Republicans. It was a hatred of government that inspired their failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act — which would have left millions of Americans without health care — in order to replace it with nothing. But life shouldn’t be a merciless race to see who can die with the most stuff. It should be about looking out for one another, and especially about helping people who are in need.
What was the worst trend of the 2010s?
Farhad: Journalists and politicians spending their time on Twitter. The social network fosters groupthink and too-cool, reflexive herds, and it conflates reality with the whims of extremely online crowds.
Bari: Perhaps the word for the very real problem Farhad is describing is cowardice. The lack of courage in so many quarters — journalism, in which the ambitious assiduously avoid writing about topics that might get them canceled; the Republican Party, which has been reduced to Trump sycophancy and apologias for white nationalism; the Democratic Party, which sometimes seems to be taking its talking points from red rose Twitter — continues to blow my mind.
Jennifer: People bringing their cellphones to the dinner table.
What’s something you’re optimistic about?
Farhad: The 2020s. I mean, not really, things will probably get worse, but it’d be churlish to start out expecting the worst. Let’s all plan to make things better.
Margaret: The teenagers. In failing to face the realities of climate change, we are robbing our children of their birthright, and in failing to stand up to the gun lobby, we are allowing them to be slaughtered in their schools. From Greta Thunberg to the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, and far beyond, teenagers are tired of our excuses, and their fury gives me hope.
Bari: That Americans agree. Well, not about abortion. But about more than we regularly appreciate. The fact that we’re surveilled by giant companies? That enrages most people and rightly so. That it’s punishingly expensive to have children and raise a family in the country? Americans on both sides feel that.
Jennifer: “Duck Dynasty” was canceled in 2017. Whenever I’m feeling low, I try to remember this, and I feel a little better. Not much though.
Have thoughts about the 2010s? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
WHAT YOU’RE SAYING
Here’s what readers had to say about the last edition, featuring a Watergate-era Republican on impeachment.
Brian from Oregon: “We need more people like Mr. Cohen holding public office. Sadly, I think he’s correct about Trump’s re-election prospects as well.”
Nick from New York: “Let’s cut the revisionist nonsense about Nixon. He opened a back door channel to Hanoi via a Chinese-American socialite — promising a better deal if elected, thereby stalling the Paris Peace talks. L.B.J. called him on it. He lied.”
Bihari from Nepal: “The problem with American democracy (or lack of it) has very little to do with whether it is Nixon or Trump. … It is now incumbent on the United States to switch to a parliamentary form of democracy under which the head of government is under the immediate watch of the parliament 24/7. Boris Johnson of the U.K. cannot come even remotely close to Mr. Trump in his lies, in his mismanagement, in his womanizing, in his corruption and in his lack of manners.”
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