We are both in awe of and profound debt to everyone who contributed to our End of the 00s series. I know how much you love it when I get earnest, so I'll just keep it brief and say that we were overwhelmed by both the willingness of so many people to provide these pieces and the quality of the material they gave to us. Anyway, because of the vagaries of the holiday weekends and our brilliant idea to switch servers in the middle of a gigantic, ongoing project, it's a pretty fair bet that you missed at least one of the 49 essays in the series. Here's a list of every single one of them, which we encourage you to dip into at your leisure; there is almost certainly something here for everyone. Enjoy. READ MORE

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348. The Girls Next Door READ MORE

I have anxiety about not living in a place with food trucks. Their eclectic menus and their varied proprietors, for me, represent a sophisticated and cultured world. A diverse one. Buffalo, of course, has a few hot dog carts stationed downtown and a few more Mister Softee trucks circling neighborhoods during the summer months. When I see how people line up at taco trucks in Los Angeles or pickle carts in New York, I become envious. Back in the 1990s, Hannibal Lecter explained that we covet what we see every day. And in this decade, it seems that every day I read a story about food trucks. So I covet them. READ MORE

It was 2004. We lived in Philadelphia. I'd bought a house in June on South 13th Street, in a neighborhood that had at one time been nearly all Italian but was now a mix of Mexicans, gays, Vietnamese, and Urban Outfitters employees. Real estate was cheap. I had an adjustable-rate mortgage. I rented out the downstairs apartment to a costume designer with bad credit and Moe moved into my second bedroom upstairs. I worked at an alt-weekly and rode a bike. READ MORE

"'The world is my idea:'-this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness." READ MORE

This was going to be about how September 11* served as eerie metaphorical foreshadowing for the decade that followed. Basically: In the 00s, we saw loosely organized nodes of ordinary people (al-Qaeda, bloggers, file sharers) wreak havoc on behemoth institutions that should've totally outclassed them in terms of resources and experience (America, the news industry, the music industry). Deep, right? But- READ MORE

It was one of those late November days for which the decade will perhaps be remembered, a day that should have been cold but was not. Stephen and I decided to take a walk to the Hudson River, and though the air felt good -the way it does in late spring, when you put away your jacket for the season -I could not shake a sense that there was something unhealthy about it, as if I had mistakenly wandered onto the grounds of a hospital. READ MORE

I began the decade with a Kim's Video membership and an unslakable thirst for documentaries about crazy people. I'd rent their only VHS of Chicken Hawk, a doc about NAMBLA members, that featured a particularly memorable monologue from a yellow turtleneck aficionado about something he called "gentle time." READ MORE

New York is a town without time, but it has a date. I moved to the city after the attacks. These are the things that made me a New Yorker. READ MORE