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It seems to me that the 00s ended with the final withdrawal of NATO soldiers from Afghanistan in 2021 Or with the end of Britney’s conservatorship Or with the coming into public knowledge that Paris Hilton had been abused as a child, and that her seemingly unfounded mode of celebrity, the unhinged bling of her stardom, so endemic to that decade, could in fact be reread as the triumph of a victim It is as if the decade before last is only now being tried, its witnesses called to the stand one by one Gilmore Girls: feminist Gossip Girl: not George Bush: apparently moderate, by comparison The contemporary is looping back to its mother, that first decade of the millennium, which for so long left its questions unanswered, ribbons fluttering in the wind     Nothing is ever over when it’s over, only much later This is partly because hours and days and years are arbitrary divisions, and partly because many things are unfathomable in the moment they take place, and so simply don’t take place in that moment, but stretch out for however long it takes for us to be able to grasp them You could say the nineteenth century ended when the Crystal Palace burst into flames and Virginia Woolf finished her novel The Years on November 30, 1936 My college era began two years after I started college, and only ended two years after I left This was because the affects which defined that period took some time to take hold, and would not be so easily superseded by what came after So strong and complex were they, so bold in the questions they brought up, that nothing that happened during that time would help me understand them – the clues were in the aftermath    In childhood and adolescence you are defencelessly immersed in the public sphere and its institutions Without the experience of any precedence at all, everything is truth The arrival of large espresso-based to-go drinks in Northern Europe, of Miss Sixty jeans and reality TV and homes decorated entirely in white with a single