Here’s a picture of what life looked like at the turn of the millennium: We couldn’t stop gossiping about the extramarital affairs of the scandal-ridden president of the United States; we rented movies from Blockbuster and showed off our vast CD collections; we waited patiently for modems to connect us to the internet (and hoped that no one had to use the phone at the same time). We had no idea what the future would bring — how could we?

Now that it’s 2025, it seems like a good moment to take stock of what the last 25 years have actually wrought. And what a dizzying era it’s been, encompassing five US presidencies, one global financial collapse, major wars, the rise of algorithms, and a wholesale transformation of media and technology. All along, the culture we devoured and engaged with reflected this ever-changing world: our hopes, fears, ambitions, delights, compulsions, and values.

At Vox, we set out to identify the 25 pieces of culture that best explain the great sweep of the last quarter-century. We limited our focus to tangible cultural artifacts that illuminated something fundamental about their moment in time. We not only looked at traditional art forms like movies, music, TV shows, and books, but also hashtags, apps, viral food trends, and in one instance, a revolutionary pharmaceutical drug. These entries aren’t necessarily firsts or even bests, but they represent the zenith of the larger tides and trends of the 21st century so far.

Read on to find out how The Fellowship of the Ring embodied the post-9/11 Bush years, how RuPaul’s Drag Race mainstreamed LGBTQ acceptance, and how The Joe Rogan Experience mirrors a newly paranoid nation.

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.

Call of Duty

The choice of perspective is one of the most important decisions any artist can make in any medium — and that goes for video games as well. From the 2D, side-scrolling layout of Super Mario Bros. to the god’s-eye, overhead view of The Legend of Zelda, how a designer positions their character within a virtual world sets up everything that follows. Which is why it matters that Call of Duty, one of the bestselling and most influential video game franchises of all time, sets its perspective at the point of a gun.

From its maiden entry in 2003, which put players in the boots of Allied soldiers in World War II, to 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 — yes, 6 — the 20-plus games in the franchise have been united by the fact that they solely show the world with a weapon pointed at it.

Such first-person shooters existed before Call of Duty, but they learned toward the cartoony, like the demon-killing space marines of the Doom games or the Bond movie caricatures of GoldenEye 007. Call of Duty brought the weapons-eye view to the modern age, at the exact moment in the 2000s when US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were fighting the country’s bloodiest wars in decades. And the more realistic the Call of Duty games became — black hole projectors notwithstanding — the harder it became to tell the difference with real life, even as attention on those real wars began to wane. There are soldiers today who grew up playing Call of Duty before they ever picked up a real weapon.

With over $30 billion in total revenue, Call of Duty is on par with mega-franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Harry Potter world. But its real legacy is the way it taught a generation of gamers to view the world through a target’s sights.

—Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director

Ramen

“Did you know you’re supposed to slurp?” Around 2004, this question was inevitable in ramen shops, as the Japanese dish with roots in Chinese cuisine became the inescapable “it” food.

Everyone already knew the instant stuff was delicious (there are even some restaurants dedicated to serving it), but the boom, spearheaded by David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar and its cohort like Ippudo and Ivan Ramen, was about reintroducing the bowl of noodles to Americans as a soul-nourishing, salty, deliciously unctuous experience. The demand for ramen kept these restaurants booked and busy, and even reached a point where food Frankensteins were creating ramen burgers with noodles taking the place of the traditional bun.

At the same time, ramen symbolizes the peak of the foodie, the proudly self-proclaimed creature with a wonkish obsession with the food we, and perhaps more pertinently, people around the world, eat. Foodies reminded us that delicious meals can tell a story about the people and places they come from, and helped break down ideas about superiority and class often embedded in food (e.g., that you can celebrate Mexican food for its complexity and technique as much as “fancy” French cuisine). But sometimes that enthusiasm could wander into pretentious snobbery or even cultural appropriation — hence the inevitable backlash.

No matter what foodies say, and no matter how you feel about them, a good bowl of ramen (instant or not) will always be delicious.

—Alex Abad-Santos, senior correspondent

Harry Potter

Before JK Rowling was known for overt anti-trans rhetoric, she was simply the author of the biggest literary pop culture phenomenon in decades. First published in 1997, the Harry Potter books and the reading they inspired led to a full-on cultural obsession through the 2000s, yielding eight movies, a hit Broadway play, and three Orlando theme parks. As of 2023, it’s the bestselling book series in history, with a staggering 600 million copies sold.

The story of a young boy who finds himself invited to attend a fantastical British wizarding school landed at a moment when geeks and fans were coming into their own. Suddenly books were cool, dressing up as your favorite character for a midnight release was totally acceptable, and the internet was the perfect place to connect about all of it. Readers gathered online, and in the long wait between HP books, clamored for more children’s and young adult literature, which buoyed the industry for years.

This set the stage for subsequent reader excitement from Twilight to TikTok-era hits like Fourth Wing. Its in-world “sorting hat” easily mapped onto a burgeoning real-world cultural obsession with personality tests, and identifying as your Hogwarts house became ubiquitous. Well into the ’10s, as our cultural interests irrevocably fractured, Harry Potter remained a household topic, one of the last remnants of the monoculture.

Perhaps the most outsize influence Harry Potter had on the real world was political. In many ways, although the books started publishing during the Clinton years, they were the ultimate Obama-era text: In 2016, Harry Potter readers were more likely to dislike Donald Trump, more likely to embrace diversity, and more likely to vote for Democrats. Fans seemed to embrace difference and look out for opportunities to stand up for the little guy.

Following Rowling’s mask-off descent into virulent anti-trans sentiment in 2019, though, they’ve begun to feel like so much of the faded optimism of the “hope and change” years: shallow performances of progressivism that failed to outlast the longstanding criticisms of their weaknesses. Still, with a series reboot set to air on HBO in 2027, we could be discussing The Boy Who Lived for many years to come.

—Aja Romano, senior culture writer

“In Da Club”

The power of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” is that it can make you wistful for an experience you’ve never had. Have you had the kind of money, champagne, Bacardi, sex, friends, or ecstasy that 50 Cent had in 2003? Almost certainly not. But when this blaring, enveloping tune starts, you can’t help but remember one night that felt just as good. It’s thumpingly boastful and braggy, yet earnestly addictive, with a twist of humor. That it’s sung by a man who survived being shot nine times makes it even more legendary.

It’s a song that so perfectly encapsulates the early 2000s, before millennials knew what a global financial collapse would feel like.

Perhaps only someone that familiar with death and pain could make a song about the beauty, and treasure, of celebrating life like it’s a birthday, but not literally a birthday (“you know we don’t give a fuck it’s not your birthday”). Who, exactly, would dare to tell him his music wasn’t authentic?

It’s a song that so perfectly encapsulates the early 2000s, before millennials knew what a global financial collapse would feel like. Given what we’ve lived through and how jaded we’ve become, the song, which was an instant smash hit, can’t help but feel more and more like a fantasy. It’s not incidental that the hit might be the moment hip-hop fully melded with capitalism.

50 held an unusual place in the culture in 2003: a rapper and for-real tough guy being played on every pop station, hitting true market saturation; a street-smart man who quickly ascended to moguldom thanks to his minority ownership of Vitamin Water. (This model of early investment — instead of a simple endorsement deal — was followed by other celebs like Ashton Kutcher, Snoop Dogg, and Ryan Reynolds.) Julianne Escobedo Shepherd might have summed up his seemingly at-odds persona best when she wrote in Pitchfork: “He was the perfect pop star for the Bush era. He was a rampant capitalist. There was a certain level of nihilism to his work, but he was also escapist, despite having a lot of very kind of dark, street narratives in his music. It just took over.”

Twenty-two years after its release, the song still feels like it’s bigger than life, bigger than anyone listening, bigger than all of the clubs it’s outlasted.

—Alex Abad-Santos, senior correspondent

The Apprentice

The Apprentice, a largely forgettable entry in the mid-2000s reality TV boom, would probably have faded away like so many episodes of Ballroom Bootcamp if it weren’t for its dark, damning legacy. The Apprentice starred Donald Trump as host, fixer, and supposed billionaire Svengali, and in so doing fashioned a persona for Trump so powerful that he could use it to win two presidential elections. Yet what gets overlooked, the real reason it was able to give Trump such a potent star image, is how effectively it channeled the ethos of the mid-2000s at its height.

The show featured a team of business hopefuls competing to win the chance to work at one of Trump’s companies for one year. In the world of The Apprentice, as in the America of 2004, the value system is simple and straightforward. Glitz is good, money is better, a little playful misogyny is no big deal. (A lot of the first season challenges hinge on the women being willing to hike up their pencil skirts for the camera.) And the boss, always, reigns supreme.

Trump is shot from below so that he dominates the frame, bullying the camera into submission.

Trump is shot from below so that he dominates the frame, bullying the camera into submission. His contestants scramble around busy, dirty, chaotic Manhattan streets, but Trump, ensconced in his leather-cushioned limo, his wood-paneled board room, his gilded apartment, is a point of stillness. It was all smoke and mirrors, a TV set slapped together in an unused retail space because his real office was too ramshackle to film, but the brute logic of the story it told was clear.

In this world, the boss is the ultimate arbiter of justice and dispenser of wisdom. He is to be courted, flattered, cajoled, and entreated. There is no standing up to him, and there is no disobedience. Fair labor practices are for suckers, anyway.

The Apprentice is where Trump developed the persona that would carry him to unimaginable heights over the next 20 years. Well into his presidency, whenever he worked with camera people, he knew what to tell them: shoot him like they did on The Apprentice.

—Constance Grady, senior correspondent

PerezHilton.com

The thing about 2000s pop culture was: It was obsessed with celebrities, and it was mean. It was all about pointing and laughing at upskirt pictures and rehab visits and gay rumors. The person who pointed and laughed the loudest of all was Perez Hilton.

Hilton (whose real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr.) was the first truly huge blogger of the 2000s, and he had a simple formula. He would rip an unflattering paparazzi photo of a star off a wire service and then crudely mark it up, in........

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