The Fellowship of the Ring
When Peter Jackson's epic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring debuted on December 10, 2001, it was considered a likely boondoggle. Hollywood hadn't launched a truly successful fantasy film franchise since the first Star Wars trilogy in the 1970s. If it was going to create one now, the savvy take was that the Harry Potter movies were a better bet, with a more active fan base and a simpler, more movie-friendly plot structure than that boasted by JRR Tolkien's labyrinthine Lord of the Rings trilogy. What's more, Peter Jackson's last major film, 1996's The Frighteners, was a flop. Jackson, Variety wrote at the time, with slight incredulity, "must have convinced someone that he would do it right."
Yet The Fellowship of the Ring was a hit. It opened at $47 million domestically, the top of the box office by a record-breaking margin, and went on to gross $889 million worldwide. It was nominated for 13 Oscars, including Best Picture. "By the end," declared the Wall Street Journal in a rave review opening weekend, "you know you've been visiting a world truly governed by magic."
Fellowship and its sequels became a template for what Hollywood success would look like over the next two decades. It showed executives that people were eager to see expensive, high-production-value adaptations of intellectual property they already knew and loved, and that they would pay well for the privilege. It showed that audiences were willing to put up with a certain amount of lore — even labyrinthine lore — in exchange for high-stakes battles with a little artful CGI to make them look all the more epic.
Read the rest from senior correspondent Constance Grady here.
Facebook Wall
The first posts on my Facebook Wall, circa 2005, are some of the most embarrassing content I've ever produced online. They're remarkably sincere, positive, and clearly excited about this new thing called Facebook. But looking back at those snapshots in internet time — you can still see them if you know where to look — it's refreshing to remember how social media once fulfilled its promise to connect us. The Facebook Wall was an encapsulation of the internet culture of the time, which was, for lack of a better term, naive. The ability to put things online without knowing how to code was novel, and young people marveled at how the world was shrinking. Viral links on people's Facebook walls were goofy, not yet political or divisive.
In case you've forgotten, the Facebook Wall was one of the first features of the website that Mark Zuckerberg launched from his Harvard dorm room in 2004. Kind of like a digital version of the whiteboards college students hung on their doors, the Wall provided an empty text box where your friends could leave you messages, post a link, paste some ASCII art, or ask you out on a date.
But it quickly became much more than that. The Facebook Wall eventually evolved into News Feed, a constantly updated, scrollable list of your friends' activity across Facebook — one of the earliest examples of an algorithmically sorted feed that's infinitely long and, many would argue, the source of brain rot.
But before all that, there was the simplicity of the Facebook Wall. If I had known what it would become, I might've paid closer attention to it. Instead, I was busy telling my crushes they got "hit by the beautiful truck" with a jumbled but discernible collection of @ signs and underscores. How could I have known that posting like this would one day lead to the downfall of American democracy? It was so nice.
—Adam Clark Estes, senior correspondent
Kim and Kanye's Vogue Cover
It's rare that Anna Wintour is lauded for having her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, let alone seeing into the future. But in 2014, when Vogue's editor-in-chief unveiled the magazine's April issue featuring rapper and fashion designer Kanye West embracing his then-fiancé, reality star Kim Kardashian, she seemed to know exactly where culture was headed. The cover served as a preview for their forthcoming nuptials while, more controversially, announcing their status as one of the world's most powerful couples.
It was a move that exasperated the internet, from fashion media to regular Twitter users. While West (now known as Ye) was continuing to establish his dominance as an artist and entrepreneur, Kardashian was still filming a reality show and selling waist trainers on Instagram. The Vogue cover heralded Kim's entry into a more rarefied rung of celebrity, finally embraced by the media and fashion's usual gatekeepers. Ironically, Vogue may have needed the couple more to prove its continued relevance than the other way around.
The anger around the cover was ultimately a panic about fame in a post-social media landscape, a war that was waged throughout the decade. What did celebrity even mean if a Kardashian could land on the world's most prestigious magazine? Did we really have to pay this much attention to influencers and reality stars? For many reasons, including the election of a certain president, it turns out we did.
Now, the Vogue cover feels like a weird artifact, given the polar-opposite fates of Kardashian and Ye's celebrity and their former marriage. Ye is now best known for his rampant antisemitism, while Kardashian is a billionaire thanks in large part to her own fashion line. It turns out seeing a reality star on the cover of Vogue wasn't nearly as bizarre as things could get.
—Kyndall Cunningham, staff reporter
The Joe Rogan Experience
Joe Rogan is many things — a comedian, a commentator, and a contrarian; a reality TV star and martial artist turned host of the most listened to podcast in America: The Joe Rogan Experience. His fans say he's just asking questions, calling out liberal hypocrisy, and defending free speech. His critics use other terms: a conspiracy theorist and peddler of misinformation and anti-trans rhetoric, who platforms not just off-the-wall ideas, but dangerous narratives that cause real-world harm.
There's truth in all these labels. There's another way to think of Rogan that may help put him in his rightful context for this decade: "Joe Rogan is the Walter Cronkite of Our Era," declared British satirist Konstantin Kisin for Quillette in 2019. "Not one established newspaper or broadcaster can now compete with a popular YouTube host conducting a conversation from his self-funded studio," he wrote at the time, reflecting on Rogan's three-hour-long interrogation of Twitter executives.
Kisin's declaration — before the global Covid-19 pandemic, before the 2020 election of Joe Biden or the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump — might have been a bit premature. But he effectively predicted what Rogan would yet become: not just one of the most influential voices in politics, popular culture, and social commentary, but also a harbinger for a new form of media, communications, trust, and truth in a post-pandemic world. There is no monoculture in 2025, but for a huge part of America, the realm Rogan pioneered and steers is as close as we might get.
Read the rest from senior correspondent Christian Paz here.
