ICYMI: It’s our 20^thanniversary this year, and it’s really made us think.

For our Next 20 package, we appointed ourselves historians of the very recent past, picking the events of the past two decades that have most shaped the present.

In politics:

• Michelle Goldberg marks the 2000 candidacy of Ralph Nader, Mr. Anti-Consumption, as the ironic genesis of a new kind of consumer-oriented politics.
• Will Saletan argues that the fallout from the decision to pursue the second Iraq war has ruined the GOP.
• Jamelle Bouie looks back at Barack Obama’s “beer summit” (2009), which he thinks destroyed the idea that Obama’s election represented some kind of End of Race.

In culture:

• Nicole Holofcener’s 1996 movie Walking and Talking—a box-office disappointment—was a harbinger of a new brand of female-oriented culture, Dana Stevens argues.
• Starting in 2002, when Warner Brothers asked a major Harry Potter fan site for a partnership, fandom went legit.
• That same year, when US Weekly launched “Stars—They’re Just Like Us,” the stage was set for a different kind of relationship with celebrity.

In war:

• Wen Ho Lee’s wrongful arrest for espionage, in 1999, left Chinese Americans wondering if their government would ever trust them.
• The first drone strike, in 2001, changed our approach to conflict forever, Fred Kaplan writes.

In life:

• Mobile phones killed the telephone call, and Timothy Noah misses it.
• But the internet became a machine for introducing like-minded people to each other—sometimes, as when Mallory Ortberg met her collaborator Nicole Cliffe, to the delight of all.

Onward,

Rebecca