My 26 top cultural moments of the 2000s in alphabetical order.

Top o' the '00s: A hypertextual decennial abecedary extravaganza!

A nthony Lane on Her Majesty in "Battle Royal," a review of The Queen in The New Yorker, Oct. 9, 2006. Hot Brit-on-Brit action. Probably the greatest critic-on-movie match-up of all time. (It surpasses James Agee's review of The Lost Weekend, an appropriately evasive lush-on-lush spectacle.) Themes include the aristocracy of taste and the English way of death, the facade of Tony Blair, and the carriage of Helen Mirren. Divine, right?

"BLAK IZ BLAK" in Bamboozled, a film by Spike Lee, released Oct. 20, 2000.
The three important big-screen media critiques of the 20^th century were A Face in the Crowd, Network, and Spike's blackface fantasia—a terrifically bracing and terribly uneven nightmare about the racial politics of American entertainment. The terrorist group at the mic—called the Mau Maus and led by Mos Def's Big Blak Afrika—is fiercer than the stars of UBS's Mao Tse-Tung Hour.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in Andrea Lee's "Pennsylvania" in the anthology State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. Edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, published Sept. 16, 2008.
I defy you to name a coming-of-age story riper or lusher than this. See also Philip Roth's blurb for the short-story collection Interesting Women (2002): "Andrea Lee is the real thing. There is nothing else to say."

The design of the jacket of the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker. Executed by Seth.
Do buy a copy even if you own an earlier edition. You might as well live well. Vicious graphic elegance.

The end titles of Inland Empire, a film directed by David Lynch that premiered in the United States at the New York Film Festival, October 2006.
After a press screening of the best film I have ever taken two distinct naps in, the director and his stars took the stage for a Q and A. A reporter tried to probe Lynch's very special pulsing mass of gelatinous weirdness by asking him about Luis Buñuel. Lynch was sorry that he couldn't be of help: "Welp, I'm not much of a film buff."

You probably don't want to sit through the whole movie, so zip to the end. This spectacular features the amazing face of Laura Dern (also fabulous in 2008's Recount), the witchy allure of Laura Elena Harring (also fabulous as Rita and/or/and Camilla in 2001's Mulholland Dr., the best film of the decade), and, further, a monkey. Nina Simone provides the music, but there is no band.

The F-word  in Burn After Reading, a film directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, released Sept. 12, 2008.
Let me sleep on A Serious Man for a few more weeks. Speaking of sleep, let me wonder one more time whether No Country for Old Men shoots itself in the foot or knee or forehead at the very end with Tommy Lee Jones' dream recap. Let me propose the misanthropic hilarity of Burn After Reading as the Coens' great achievement of the decade, a cookie laced with radioactive polonium.

Gershkin in The Russian Debutante's Handbook, a novel by Gary Shteyngart, published June 6, 2002.
"The story of Vladimir Gershkin—part P.T. Barnum, part V.I. Lenin, the man who would conquer half of Europe (albeit the wrong half)—begins the way so many other things begin. On a Monday morning. In an office. With the first cup of instant coffee gurgling to life in the common lounge." It ends in Cleveland, Ohio, with the hero looking like Plucky Jim or Russian-berry Finn.

Further reading: Daniel Zalewski's portrait of the artist.

"Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs," an exhibit conceived by Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan, and Charles Traub. Opened at 116 Prince Street on Sept. 25, 2001.
It endures between the covers of a superlative book, which will itself endure as a heartrending monument long after most Sept. 11 books have been pulped.

In-flight Television. JetBlue started operations on Feb. 11, 2000.
Travel broadens the mind.

Jude in I'm Not There, a film directed by Todd Haynes, released Nov. 21, 2007.
Vocals by Stephen Malkmus, vibes by Cate Blanchett. I know that something's happening here, and I doubt that Dylan himself knows what it is. Moreover: After Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love," the single of the decade was Malkmus' "Baby, C'mon" (2005). The song is a come-on, of course, a plea. The scream at the end sounds like the wail of a newborn, as if the seduction came off flawlessly.

The kiss blown by Beyoncé at the 1:40 mark in " Crazy in Love," a video directed by Jake Nava, released May 2003.
Bubblegum pop will eat itself.

Leggings. Going on and on.
1. See here.

2. See Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up (2000): "If anything, 'sexual revolution' was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000." Wolfe, whose I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004) ranks among the decade's most underrated novels, here riffs on sartorial decorum, cultural decadence, and good old Friedrich N.: "Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century 'on the mere pittance' of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of 'the total eclipse of all values.' "