Each decade has a name.
As any decade comes to a close, people look to the new one and attempt at best a Babylonian stutter: of emotions, anxieties, or words. Who after all could have guessed real estate in Warsaw would be 5 times more expensive than in Berlin? As if to hedge our bets better in trying to answer what the next 10 years will bring, we turn to language and its arsenal of terms. As the 80s neared its end, global events held us by our ankles and shook us down. Literally and metaphorically. Perestroika, the most sincere and discreet form of pathos, and a man named Marc ushered in the 1990s. […]

Each decade has its city. Or two.
A man can either wear the clothes or the clothes can wear the man. Similarly, some cities handle the decade’s unforgiving moniker better than others. With jazz, Josephine Baker, and the surrealists providing the entertainment, the 1920s moved from New York to Paris and gave us the Roaring 20s. By the time the sixties came around, it was on the other side of the Channel that things were going down or acting up, as it were. Short skirts and small cars went by the same fortuitous name–the Mini–and long legs combined to give London the swing of the Swinging Sixties. […]

Each decade has its detractors.
Contrary to popular opinion, whether you remembered anything or not from the 1960s has, in fact, little do with whether you were there. The quest for authenticity falters when it comes to that slippery surface called duration. If the sincerity of the 1960s proved anything, it documented a naïve fall from grace that only positivism could bring about. If left and right argue endlessly about how to judge the 1960s, for some reason the 1980s receives a unanimous decision. What a strange thing to judge time.

Sure, the 1980s were excessive. There was the brat pack, Basquiat, and Boy George. Greed and Gordon Gekko reigned as economic polices trickled down and fashion swelled up, with a particular emphasis around the hair and the shoulders. Yet it seems to have become a depressing discipline of sorts, a new Olympic sport of avarice, in which every coming decade vies for the top prize. Like the unholy site of sports on steroids, we tend to forget that the 1980s was about more than just disproportionate style but also disproportionate ethics.

When they promise you Prometheus, make sure you don’t walk out with Sisyphus.

This decade belongs to Moscow.
The naughty noughties belong to the Third Rome. Whether it’s the million dollar cars, the billion dollar socialites, or the sheer Ritalin-starved energy running through the veins of fashion designers, entrepeneurs, artists, bankers, bouncers, lawyers, house-wives, or gallerists, Moscow has embraced the unapologetic and intense mash-up that has become a battle cry of an entire generation. Critics of American politics in the Middle East have no qualms driving a Hummer, girls in Khruschev-era walk-ups have no bone to pick with their Manolos, the Zhigulis have got nothing but love for the Maybach muscling them on the road. […]