Y2K

Starred review from November 1, 2024
In Y2K, Shade aims a keen literary eye toward that thorny, confounding, but constantly referenced millennium-dawning era (roughly 1997-2008). While Shade enumerates television shows, music videos, fashion trends, and headlines of the time, she avoids the nostalgia mining of simply reveling in shared, specific remembrances. Themes ranging from the pervasive xenophobia of the post-9/11 U.S. to the tabloid-fueled mistreatment of female celebrities to the housing crisis of 2008 that managed to finally burst the Y2K bubble are richly examined. Elder millennial Shade anchors her macroanalysis with stories from her own suburban upbringing, marked by the astute consumption of television and magazines. Y2K shines most where Shade's personal examinations prod at how her adolescent experiences were shaped, distorted, and razed by a cultural moment that was stuffed with promise but often failed at actually reaching those potentials. A rich hybrid of sociological inquiry and dissection of a time just out of the rearview mirror, Y2K is steeped in a specific moment in history yet manages to feel wholly trenchant. Millennial fans of Jia Tolentino and Jenny Odell will think back on their own afternoons of AOL Instant Messenger and Total Request Live while also gaining insight into the world that made them, for better or worse.

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November 15, 2024
A cultural critic revives the kooky, tech-obsessed spirit of the Y2K era. Journalist Shade scrutinizes and celebrates the new millennium with heart and a spicy sense of nostalgic humor. Drawing on inspired research interwoven with her own youthful coming-of-age memories of being obsessed with that digital, optimistic, futuristic aesthetic, the author recreates the spirited era when early personal technology was innocent fun--until it wasn't. She laments that while those childhood days were personally carefree, things have become immeasurably worse in terms of climate change, inequality, and political instability. Shade's new millennium time capsule, from one economic bubble in 1997 to another in 2008, includes the rise of websites, home personal computers, shimmery metallic-inspired MTV video pop and rap stars, and numerous milestones that all became tarnished by the atrocity of the 9/11 attacks, which collapsed the Y2K party with a sobering pause. The author employs the expertise of political scientists to remark on the rise of population diversity and queer visibility throughout the aughts and effectively integrates these social developments with her own maturing perception of the fast-emerging world around her as an adolescent. Countering the social justice movements was the "McBling" aesthetic, popularized by celebs like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, which became a "metonym for vacuity, excess, entitlement, and celebrity culture itself."South Park, Starbucks' "latte liberal" discourse, and many other influences would mark the decade with humor, hijinks, consumption, self-absorbed technology, and finally a sobering recession. Shade particularly excels with an in-depth discussion on how the techno-optimistic ascension of the internet revolutionized politics, social intercourse, and "our own individual self-perception." With the advent of social media sites, search engines, subscription content, and "anonymous and frictionless" adult website content, she notes, modern life as we knew it would never be the same. If readers can overlook the book's dizzying nonlinear timeline, Shade's exploration of those indelible years creates a fun, fulfilling, and rewarding time capsule. A reflective, nostalgic, backward glance at a bygone era some recall fondly and others regret.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 11, 2024
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.