The escape economy around the corner
IN THE DARK DAYS AFTER 9/11, DIRE PRONOUNCEments about our nation’s new cultural identity rained down like the acrid particles floating over lower Manhattan. It would be the end of irony. The end of comedy. Our sense of innocence, particularly for Gen X and millennials, who largely had known lives of peace and security, was gone. Hello fear. RIP fun.
Yet six months later, debuted on ABC. Shortly after came Then a preposterous real-life acid test to shame gold-digging women. (The show garnered 35 million viewers for its finale.) Cynicism didn’t end; it took steroids. Nowhere was that more manifest than in an obsession with celebrity that would come to define the decade. I was the young editor from 2002 to 2009 as that publication covered the frothy zeitgeist, as the soap-operatic lives of young stars who needed only one name—Britney! Lindsay! Jessica!—became American obsessions. At its peak, was read by 14 million young, educated people a week, and I often thought about why we lusted for that escape. If 9/11 taught us anything, it was to be suspicious, unsettled: danger lurks everywhere. An anxious public fled into alternate realities of no actual consequence. ( anyone?)
