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 a friend who just moved to Valparaiso, Chile-a beautifully-situated stutter of city teeming with feral dogs and nefarious purse snatchers. It's sad for me that this friend, a Best Friend if ever there was one, will be spending the last glimmering twitches of this decade in a place so thief-ridden and faraway, because we spent the first early ticks of it together, freezing and sick in the Boston Common. It was actually the night that we first became real friends, not just two kids working on a play together, not just two people who occasionally passed each other in the same lazy social orbit. We bonded that night, felt a first giddy fear and excitement together. It was New Year's Eve 1999, that heady night when it felt like the world could maybe, just maybe, end entirely. Because of some glitch—something to do with nothing more mundane or simple but oddly poetic as the changing numbers of the date—all the computers in the world could explode and we'd be tossed into darkness, forced to reignite primordial fires and warily navigate a reset world. 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 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

There's something sort of patriotic about the fact that I'll be memorializing the aughts well into this brave new year with a sizable debt to Bank of America. Like our great nation, I spent the last ten years getting stung and overcompensating, acting indecisive and entitled, living way beyond my means. And now I am paying. With interest! My credit card statements are so textbook "Don't" they deserve a reality show: a trip to Japan for the wedding of a couple I'd never met; $500 worth of phone calls from what was supposed to be a budget trip to the Dominican Republic; shitty new Ikea furniture to replace shitty broken Ikea furniture; more late fees than I care to add up; more liquor than I care to admit. Oh hai, it's me! The girl Suze Orman warned you about. READ MORE