Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was)

In this trenchant debut collection, millennial essayist Shade details how the social and economic convulsions of the “Y2K Era” (1997–2008) set the stage for the 21st century. In “Closing Time,” she contends that America’s blind faith in neoliberal capitalism led to the Great Recession, tracing the country’s history of laissez-faire economic policy while recounting how her uncle had to sell his mansion, bought with wealth earned in the dot-com boom, after the real estate market crashed in 2008. Using cultural touchstones as prisms through which to view macro trends, she argues that entrepreneur Howard Schultz’s transformation of Starbucks from a small coffeehouse chain founded by San Francisco hippies into an international corporate behemoth “represented the selling out of the aging baby boomer generation” and the “frivolity of an ever-increasing consumer culture where yuppies spent $5 a day on customized coffee.” The selections elegantly blend dark humor with thought-provoking arguments, as in “Larry Summers Caused My Eating Disorder,” where Shade posits that laissez-faire economists who understand the world as a competition in which a few prevail over the rest established the underlying logic of beauty standards that value thinness over more prevalent body types. A rich blend of cultural and economic analysis, this soars. Agent: Erik Hane, Headwater Literary. (Jan.)