33 Ways to Remember the 2010s

We were so young in 2012, and asked for so little. Remember that summer, when “The Avengers” wowed us by putting six superheroes onscreen? Only six! And one of them was Hawkeye! But still we were gobsmacked, and it was good.

Seven years later, in its orgiastic finale, “Avengers: Endgame” unleashed over two dozen superheroes — admittedly, one of them was still Hawkeye — and while pleasure centers were hit to the tune of a worldwide gross that approached $3 billion, it couldn’t help but feel familiar. As the decade went on, we had become supersaturated with superheroics.

Look at the box office, where the top space has so often been reserved for the next Marvel sequel, from “Iron Man” to “Captain America” to “Guardians of the Galaxy.” Look to the awards circuit, where “Black Panther” became an Oscar-winning, best-picture nominee while “Joker” took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. “Wonder Woman” and “Captain Marvel” proved these movies aren’t just for boys, while “Deadpool” and “Logan” ventured into surprisingly lucrative R-rated waters. On the small screen, The CW turned nearly all of its network schedule over to crime fighters, while “Watchmen” proved masked vigilantes can dominate prestige TV, too.

Old-school auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola may decry the comic-book stranglehold on our pop-cultural conversation, but don’t expect that grip to loosen anytime soon. It’s the superheroes’ world now. We’re just being saved in it.

Let’s see. “Moonlight” won the Oscar for best picture in 2017, the year after “Carol” was a six-time nominee. “Will & Grace” came back and another batch of “Queer Eye” got hatched. Who can say why, but they’re here. Get used to it. Frank Ocean happened. So, at last, did Brandi Carlile. Billy Porter became the first openly gay man to win the best actor Emmy for his exclamatory work on “Pose.” Michael Douglas played Liberace and Matt Damon played his partner in lamé. Basketball players came out. So did football players and a professional wrestler. Not that many but still. And the best show on TV, in any format, was “Orange Is the New Black.” A rockudrama about Elton John made a ton of money. One about Freddie Mercury made a ton more.

It’s been, as they say, a decade.

In speeding from the sidelines to the center, life’s become all queer on the Western Front, and in work that, for the most part, insisted on humanity and dignity. People told everybody from the president to Dave Chappelle that trans lives matter. No complaints here! The center might actually hold! Yet, please, allow me to pour one out for the dearly departed margins of yesteryear. They’ll be missed. We haven’t had a new John Waters movie since 2004. I just double-checked that. I didn’t need to, though. Where was the anarchy during these 10 years? Where was the bad taste? The insanity, the filth, the trash? Ryan Murphy shouldn’t have to do it alone, and lord knows it took him long enough to really dare. The fight for “normal” has been long and arduous. It’s not even done. It can’t end on the carpets of the Met Gala either. The culture fell in love with an identity that’s spent a decade estranged from any real artistic sensibility. Normal might be for the greater good, but good nonsense feels so much better.

For five years, the shorthand for “wildly innovative album release strategy” was “In Rainbows” — a reference to Radiohead’s unexpected announcement on Oct. 1, 2007 that a full LP would be arriving in 10 days, mostly in digital formats and for whatever price listeners wished to pay.

Beyoncé, of course, changed that. On Dec. 13, 2013 she dropped a complete “visual album” out of the sky and onto iTunes: 14 new songs with accompanying videos tackling the intersections of feminism, sexuality, blackness and power. It sold 430,000 digital copies as a full album in 24 hours.

“Pull a Beyoncé” entered the lexicon (and Urban Dictionary), and artists began considering the surprise release a viable option for music delivery. (Some, however, were more successful than others with their made-in-secret albums — just ask U2.) But the ever-restless Beyoncé wasn’t done yet. She iterated on the idea three years later with “Lemonade,” an unannounced concept album accompanied by an hourlong film that debuted on HBO and used the poet Warsan Shire’s words as connective tissue between seemingly autobiographical songs about infidelity, pain and renewal. Now “Lemonade” is shorthand for releasing an album with a grand visual component — and giving Jay-Z some side-eye.

For years it languished, blocked by Rudolph Giuliani, who, as mayor, could only see the disused viaduct that sluiced through Manhattan’s West Side as an eyesore and obstacle to growth. Now, the High Line attracts more visitors than the Metropolitan Museum and the Statue of Liberty, a mixed blessing. Since it opened a decade ago, it has spawned billions of dollars in new developments, millions in tax revenues and countless imitators around the globe like D.C.’s 11th Street Bridge Park and Atlanta’s BeltLine. An instant landmark of landscape architecture by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Piet Oudolf, it is, hands down, the most influential design project of the last decade.

That said, when Absolut launched an ad campaign called “Still Avoiding the High Line” it was in response to all the New Yorkers boasting about not visiting the park because it was overrun by tourists. The initial magic of the “Rear Window” views onto neighboring tenements and taxi warehouses, the subtlety and innovation of its plantings and architectural details, the uplifting sense it gave of floating through a secret garden above the street had succumbed to congestion and a canyon of glass towers. For the High Line’s admirable, activist founders, perhaps the worst of the unintended consequences of success was that the 5,000 residents in the nearby public housing projects didn’t find it welcoming and stayed away in droves.

So the High Line has lobbied hard to win over them and other New Yorkers, and people of color now make up a third of its visitorship. It has started the High Line Network to counsel infrastructure reuse projects in other cities in the pitfalls of gentrification and runaway development. Like New York itself, the park remains a work in progress, a beacon, conundrum and glory.

Once upon a time an aging ingénue in Hollywood was reliant on the good graces of the film industry — its predominantly male directors, writers, power structure — to toss her the occasional tertiary role to keep her off professional life support. Perhaps the fashion industry could bolster her profile and pocketbook, with an ambassadorship or red carpet deal.

But then came Instagram and then came Snapchat, and then came revelation, courtesy of Gwyneth Paltrow. She figured out that a beautiful woman with a dedicated fan base, highly developed taste and hard-won knowledge of how to maintain her physical and emotional prime could parlay those assets into a digital-focused independent business model, which would forever liberate her from the need to rely on others for – well, anything. Take what had once been called “vanity,” rechristen it “wellness,” employ endorsement to your own ends, and voilà: lifestyle brand empire.

Goop may have been founded in 2008 but it really took off in the last decade, evolving from a newsletter for friends into a multipronged e-tailer/conference/platform that exploited all our own neuroses about health and happiness. It has spawned numerous celebrity copycats and made Paltrow the Jeff Bezos of her Hollywood cohort. They may have mocked her for her crystals-of-the-month (among other holiday absurdities), but with a company valued at $250 million, she has had the last laugh.

Oh my god, people did so many crimes, and got away with so many crimes, while others were wrongly convicted of so many crimes, and people witnessed so much suffering and joked about so much suffering, and people made transformative art and grotesque mockeries and sought justice and sought money, and we all said “mail… kimp?” That was true crime in the 2010s: Everywhere, everything.

“Dateline” never left us and presumably never will, but an hour a week is nothing compared to the wall-to-wall programming of Investigation Discovery or Oxygen, or HLN, or the defunct Cloo, or the revived Court TV. But true crime went prestige, too, with “The Jinx” and “Making a Murderer,” and with arguably the high-water mark for TV this decade in any genre, “O.J.: Made In America.” Dramatizations abounded (like “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”), and satires, too.

It was “Serial” though that burned the brightest, defining the true-crime podcast but also for lots of listeners defining a podcast period. It was retro in its audio-only weekly releases but of its era with the obsessive dissection it inspired.

When fan culture turned some of its attention to real people and their real pain, sometimes it brought injustice to light, and sometimes it compounded cruelties. The genre hasn’t changed — juicy tabloid coverage and poignant, piercing coverage have long existed — but in our era of reboots and relentlessness, the way we experience it has. Be it brilliant, scuzzy, important or miserable, like everything else now, it’s constant.

What do we mean when we talk about “the algorithm,” the unseen force that pulls the strings of our online experience? Part of the point is that we do not know quite what we mean. This force might also be called artificial intelligence, or machine learning, or a neural network. Whatever we call it, it sounds smart, communicating that these platforms are run in a way that exceeds the understanding of the average user.

Facebook introduced its algorithmically generated newsfeed in 2006; Instagram and Twitter switched over to algorithmic timelines in 2016. And in recent years, “the algorithm” has grown in the public imagination from a benign product feature into an internet bogeyman. YouTube’s recommendation engine stands accused of radicalizing viewers with increasingly extreme materials, personalizing our feeds and dissolving the social fabric at once. Instagram and Twitter’s announcements that content would no longer be presented chronologically were met by users with impotent rage. We began to bristle at our identities and habits and relationships being used as inputs in opaque computing processes for the benefit of multinational corporations.

The algorithm has become more than a computational process. It’s emerged as a shadowy figure in our online experience. And it can feel as if it is lurking in the shadows, mocking us. When these algorithms accurately predict what we would like to see and buy, or when we’ll get married or pregnant or divorced, they make our lives and minds feel small. They make our fates feel predestined, and not in a grand and mystical way, but in a sinister one.

Academics can report that the YouTube recommendation algorithm is not so influential after all, or that users actually tend to enjoy the content that the algorithm serves us, but that doesn’t change the emotional reality of the system. We want to feel in control of our online destinies, even if we’re not.

So, thank you — among many, many others — Ashley Judd & Annabella Sciorra & Rose McGowan & Gwyneth Paltrow & Mira Sorvino & Lupita Nyong’o & Kathryn Bigelow & Ava DuVernay & Patty Jenkins & Gina Prince-Bythewood & Kelly Reichardt & Greta Gerwig & Karyn Kusama & Dee Rees & Marielle Heller & Debra Granik & Mary Harron & Chloé Zhao & Tamara Jenkins & Lena Dunham & Julia Reichert & Nicole Holofcener & Elizabeth Banks & Angela Robinson & Lisa Cholodenko & Barbra Streisand & Nisha Ganatra & Kimberly Peirce & Anna Boden & Lulu Wang & Kasi Lemmons & Jennifer Lee & Megan Ellison & Emma Thomas & Effie T. Brown & Christine Vachon & Nina Yang Bongiovi & Dede Gardner & Nina Jacobson & Ilisa Barbash & Constance Wu & Alison Klayman & Elisabeth Moss & Amy Adams & Charlize Theron & Gugu Mbatha-Raw & Nicole Kidman & Jennifer Lawrence & Viola Davis & Cate Blanchett & Tessa Thompson & Melissa McCarthy & Reese Witherspoon & Meryl Streep & Natalie Portman & Frances McDormand & Regina Hall & Kristin Stewart & Laura Dern & Jessica Chastain & Regina King & Angelina Jolie & Phyllis Nagy & Linda Woolverton & Nicole Perlman & Tracy Oliver & Andrea Berloff & Rachel Morrison & Geena Davis & Martha Lauzen & Stacy L. Smith.

The cri de coeur started off, as so many movements these days do, with a tweet.

“#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” April Reign, a black media activist, wrote on Twitter early in 2015, after that year’s acting nominees ended up all being white. When the same thing happened the next year, the hashtag exploded, to the umbrage of some at the overwhelmingly older, white and male Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars. One member groused to The Times that it had been that very academy, after all, that anointed Sidney Poitier best actor in 1964.

But others at the academy acknowledged a problem and vowed to diversify. In the last four years, the group has doubled the percentage of members of color in its ranks, to 16 percent, and boosted its female membership from a quarter to nearly a third. In recent years, artists of color and films with diverse story lines garnered Oscar attention, and “Moonlight,” “Black Panther,” “BlacKkKlansman,” “Roma,” “Fences” and “Get Out” all collected wins.

If this signaled a shift, a broader view suggested the miles to go; by one count, just 15 of this past year’s 212 Oscar nominees were black, and this was a near-historic high. Still, the Oscars So White movement mainstreamed criticism about Hollywood’s homogeneity, paving the way for #MeToo, and shifting diversity into something audiences increasingly expect and demand. According to Reign, Oscars So White will remain relevant until “firsts” for nominees of color are no longer of note. As she wrote last year on Twitter, “The fight continues.”

Even now, it sounds kind of implausible: a hip-hop musical about America’s first treasury secretary, peppered with rap battles over debt assumption and the Franco-American alliance. But when “Hamilton” opened at the decade’s midpoint, it was an instant sensation. Ultimately celebrated by one president (Obama) and denounced by another (Trump), it became the rare work of theater to penetrate the nation’s cultural conversation.

The show made a celebrity of its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Quick: How many other musical theater composers have become household names?) It also intensified the commercial theater’s focus on diversity on Broadway, as the creative team cast Hispanic, black and Asian-American performers as America’s founding generation, suggesting that the nation’s revolutionary aspirations can be both inclusive and ongoing.

The show is an enormous blockbuster, and there are no signs appetite has slackened: It is Broadway’s top-grossing show each week, with a ticket price of $847 for many seats. On Broadway alone, it has been seen by more than 2.4 million people and has grossed over $600 million (it cost just $12.5 million to make), and it is also playing in five other productions around the United States and in London, with Australia and Germany soon to come.

Its success has been a major ingredient in a broader Broadway boom — after a period in which musical theater seemed to be culturally marginalized.

The art form is clearly back (thanks “Glee,” and “Pitch Perfect,” and TikTok, and all those live musical telecasts). Fueled in part by rising tourism in New York City, Broadway grosses increased by 80 percent over the decade, while attendance was up by about 24 percent.

People just want to be in the room where it happens.

More international influxes are doubtless in store. Of course the internet has helped, as potential fans can circumvent old-school radio gatekeepers with streaming services. Now there are new dictionaries for a venerable pop formula: catchy plus cute breaks through.

Now that #MeToo is a household term, it is hard to remember that the global movement originated with a civil rights activist from the Bronx named Tarana Burke, who started using the phrase (sans hash tag) on MySpace in 2006 to raise awareness about sexual violence. But the #MeToo movement truly took off in 2017, after the actress Alyssa Milano urged women in a tweet to share their experiences of sexual misconduct by the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

It’s touched off a wholesale rethinking of behavior in the workplace and a reckoning that continues to leave a trail of alleged miscreants in its wake. Many of the dominoes have fallen in the cultural world, including the comedian Louis C.K., the music mogul Russell Simmons and the longtime steward of New York City Ballet, Peter Martins.

The heightened awareness about sexual harassment has prompted considerable soul searching in the creative industries and emboldened long-silent victims to tell their stories. Still uncertain, however, is the promise of lasting institutional change.

Already, there has been a backlash against the #MeToo movement, with some arguing that allegations like those against the comedian Aziz Ansari had gone too far and that perpetrators who apologize, like Louis C.K., should be given a shot at redemption.

All of this has raised the larger complicated question of whether artists can be separated from their art. Should museums continue to display work by Chuck Close? Should radio stations continue to play Michael Jackson? Should developers continue to commission buildings by Richard Meier & Partners?

As Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, told The Times in June 2018: “How much are we going to do a litmus test on every artist in terms of how they behave?”

On Oct. 3, 2009, Gustavo Dudamel took the stage as the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Then just 28, he has over the past 10 years injected what was already a creative and wealthy ensemble with youthful energy, giving the stamp of his precocious stardom to dozens of major commissions and ambitious education and social justice projects.

Farther north, the Seattle Symphony broadened its contemporary programming under Ludovic Morlot, its music director from 2011 to 2019. It had an unlikely hit premiering John Luther Adams’s “Become Ocean,” which resonated in a time of climate crisis and won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music; a recording that even inspired Taylor Swift to donate $50,000 to the orchestra.

And last year Esa-Pekka Salonen — the widely respected composer and conductor who preceded Dudamel in Los Angeles and who had made it clear that he wasn’t interested in a then-open New York Philharmonic job or any other podium position — shocked the music world by announcing he'd take on the artistic leadership of the San Francisco Symphony.

It’s always been a bit of a gimmick that serious art really happened only east of the Mississippi, at the “big five” orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago. But the story of the past decade has been the full arrival of the West Coast as not simply a force but the reigning powerhouse in American music.

Sometime this decade, podcasts stopped being a way to listen and became a way of life. The audio product offers a porthole into a vast extended podcast universe. Fandoms generate mountains of content for every show, from the Murderinos riffing off the feminist true crime podcast “My Favorite Murder” to the internet sleuths who saw “Serial” as a starting point for their own investigations. There is a Facebook group for single people who listen to “Pod Save America” (“Pod Save Dating”) and one for “The Last Podcast on the Left” fans who revel in the drama generated by the podcast’s main Facebook group. I belong to a dozen affinity groups loosely inspired by my favorite podcast, “Who? Weekly,” a show about obscure “famous” people; they include the fitness group “Who?lth and Fitness,” the politics group “Who?lebrity Deathmatch 2020” and the dog group “Who?s a Good Boy Weekly.”

Podcasts — with their intimate voices ported into our ears — excel at establishing a tone, a perspective, a mood. That has made them useful as internet-wide sorting mechanisms. They have organized people into highly specific communities, filtering them by their senses of humor and political leanings and conversational styles and then atomizing them into endless topic areas — often ones the podcast itself does not cover. Recently I’ve found that I listen to podcasts less but I think about them more. I’m a member of more than one self-help group inspired by “Forever35,” which I’m sure is a wonderful podcast, though I wouldn’t know. I’ve never actually heard it. We are beyond the pod now: the idea of a podcast has subsumed the thing itself.

One might think that when Netflix decided to unleash bingeing for new programs — introducing “House of Cards,” by dropping 13 episodes all at once, upending an industry norm — executives at the streaming service may have been a bit unsure about their experiment. Maybe a little nervous.

But no. Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive, bluntly called it “the future of television.”

What Netflix brought into our culture — hundreds of new show releases, all dropped at once — has forever changed how we can consume programs. Within just a couple of years, casually blurting out plot developments regarding any TV series — spoiling things — became a huge social faux pas.

Instituting bingeing was, essentially, just putting a new spin on something old. Before 2013, plenty of people caught up with series like “Breaking Bad,” “The Real Housewives,” “Lost” or “Homeland” during cable marathons or bought them on iTunes or DVDs. But Netflix popularized this for shows new and old (it introduced “Friends” to a whole new generation) and it even helped provide a safe pretext for inviting someone over for casual sex — “Netflix and chill.”

But the rest of the TV and streaming universe have been, mostly, holdouts on binge-style releases (Amazon excepted). All of this hesitation can be safely blamed on HBO and the runaway success of its drama “Game of Thrones.” The most popular show of the decade did it all by delivering episodes the fuddy-duddy way of weekly releases.

But the show only became more popular as the series drew to a close. And how? Millions of new viewers got hopelessly hooked after they binged the show's previous seven seasons before the final season began in April.

In a decade dominated by the illusions of virtual reality, theater put up a strong defense for the real thing. Around the globe, an ever-multiplying slew of immersive productions have been doing their damnedest to tempt audiences away from their screens and into the tactile here and now of three dimensions. These are shows that recreate the decision-making suspense of interactive video, while transforming the passive voyeurism that is always part of live theater into something more dynamic. Sure, a state-of-the-art streaming show like “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” is a hoot, but can it reach out and touch you?

The glamorous, long-lived grandparent of such live fare is generally agreed to be “Sleep No More,” from the international company Punchdrunk, which had its New York opening in a custom-built hotel in Chelsea in 2011. There theatergoers can still map their own journeys through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, populated by sinister actors and dancers, as the bloody tale of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is (sort of) retold à la Alfred Hitchcock.

That production’s success has opened the floodgates to a host of variations that allow participants to be more than spectators. Warehouses, abandoned hospitals and sound stages, even the great outdoors of urban cityscapes, have become the settings for fantastical journeys into shifting alternative universes inspired by “Alice in Wonderland,” “Mulholland Drive,” the K-pop star system and even (I swear) “Waiting for Godot,” the theme for an escape room in Los Angeles.

As befits an age of instant celebrity, such works allow audience members to step out of the shadows and into the spotlight, sometimes to discomfiting effect. And their influence is increasingly creeping into traditional theater. This year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s racially charged “Fairview,” ends with one of theater’s ultimate role reversals, leaving much of its audience squirming onstage.

It was the Hollywood epoch when I.P. became the star. That’s “intellectual property,” studio executives will explain to you with a patronizing pat on the head — a pre-existing thing (video game, comic book, toy, theme park ride, science-fiction novel, TV show, song catalog) that comes with a built-in fan base. Hang some visual effects on it and book the IMAX run.

Prequel, sequel or spinoff? Reboot, remake or revamp? It has to be one. Studios served up the 12th “X-Men” movie and the 12th “Star Wars” movie. There was Marvel’s “Infinity Saga,” which stretched across 21 films this decade (23 total) and also sprouted television appendages like “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Godzilla made his 35th movie in May; No. 36 is scheduled for March.

Mercifully, studios only served up one “Baywatch,” which was based on a swimsuit, and one “Battleship,” based on a board game. But a crossover project is surely in the works.

I.P. became an arms race. Disney swallowed 20th Century Fox — slurp — and got “Avatar,” Bart Simpson and Wolverine. Universal snapped up Shrek and Toothless the dragon. AT&T bought Bugs Bunny, Harry Potter and Wonder Woman. Wait. Nobody has the movie rights to Hello Kitty? BUY THEM. Who cares if she doesn’t have a mouth! We’ll fix it in post.

Here’s the thing: Hollywood is only doing its job. People love to grouse about the franchise-ification of movies, but they still buy tickets in swarms. The business of show has become heavily corporatized; studio executives have a responsibility to wring every last dollar from their libraries. (Consider “Charlie’s Angels” wrung.) Movies based on properties that are already popular have a better shot at assembling the masses — jolting people away from Fortnite and Facebook and Netflix, now streaming in your pocket.

And while venture capitalists cannot be paid back in cred, SoundCloud’s depth of influence has helped keep it afloat. A day after his initial message, Chance reported back that the site was “here to stay” — a promise that, as MySpace showed, will probably prove naïve. But its darkened corners are still here for now, and that’s not nothing.

When Misty Copeland became the first female African-American principal at American Ballet Theater in 2015, it was a momentous step. But for Copeland, who joined Ballet Theater in 2001, it was also hard won. Then and now, her promotion represents something bigger than herself. What’s especially stunning about Copeland is her awareness of her platform and how well she uses it to talk about the dearth of black dancers, especially female, in classical ballet. Because of her visibility, the landscape is changing. Young girls — and, just as important, their parents — now have a role model both off the stage and on, where Copeland, 37, has continued to push her artistry to new places. In recent years, she’s developed into a magnetic dramatic ballerina who isn’t afraid to dance like a woman. And that’s stunning, too.

When, in 2019, people tweet “everything is Gamergate,” the comments may be referencing any number of things: the conspiracists of QAnon, or the YouTube-fueled targeting of actresses in major film franchises, or even the way that social media campaigns have been weaponized by and against governments around the world. But, like Gamergate, they are all manifestations of an old impulse, using the technology of a new era to fight on behalf of a preferred social order.

Such is the reach of China’s growing financial and cultural might, that it can wield enormous influence over how the country is depicted in the Hollywood blockbusters Americans make and watch. The incentive for studios is obvious: ensuring access to China’s booming box office — which is expected to surpass that of the United States in the next few years — and seemingly limitless cash reserves. But the practice of Hollywood sucking up to China has unsettled many Americans, so much so that Stephen Colbert even did a segment on the subject. The title? “Pander Express.”

The platform also democratized who receives airtime and what viewpoints are heard, which is not necessarily a good thing as rampant misinformation and hateful messages of extremists spread unchecked. As the decade draws to a close, YouTube’s continued dominance is under threat by Instagram, Netflix and TikTok. But by conditioning a generation of users to like and subscribe, its influence is in no danger of fading.

This was a decade when the culture wars, that staple of the 1980s and ’90s, came roaring back, and it began with a very predictable rerun. In 2010, religious conservatives assailed the National Portrait Gallery for displaying a video by the gay artist David Wojnarowicz featuring ants crawling on a crucifix. They called it “assault” on religion. The gallery removed it. There were cries of censorship.

So far, so 1989. But in the years that followed, the battles moved beyond museums, college campuses and other traditional theaters of conflict, as every decision about what to watch, read or listen to threatened to become a proxy answer to the question: Which side are you on? The question applied even when the stakes were obscure: pop-culture products engineered for the mass-est of mass audiences, like “Batman v Superman” or “The Last Jedi,” were often described as “polarizing” or “divisive.”

It has now become common for social conservatives to argue that liberals are the real culture warriors, who won’t stop until they have achieved total victory by running every dissenter off the airwaves (except for Fox) and by purging every Christmas greeting from the public square (see: Starbucks holiday coffee cups).

The return of the culture wars coincided with the rise of another metaphor: the bubble. Tools normally used for postelection analysis have been used to map parts of the country where people watched “Duck Dynasty” and “16 and Pregnant” versus territory claimed by “Modern Family” and “The Daily Show.”

The idea of “the bubble” was seized on not just as a diagnosis, but as a weapon, even before Donald J. Trump rode the resentment of bubble-dwelling coastal elites to the White House. Once upon a time, conservative calls for “cultural literacy” meant knowledge of Shakespeare and Plato. Now it also means exposure to NASCAR and Applebee’s.

Fortnite’s accessibility has been key to its success. It is a free-to-play game that features guns but not gore and is available on the computer, along with the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. When Epic Games, its publisher, added the ability to play on cellphones, schools became an unwitting battleground.

Games have always been immersive, but they were once discrete experiences: A customer paid for a cartridge or a CD that contained a limited number of immutable levels. Fortnite is one of the prominent games showing that more — much more — is possible.

The comedy special was not born in the second decade of this century. But that is when it grew up and multiplied, becoming a culturally dominant artistic genre.

What was once an occasional pop culture snack became part of a weekly diet, with comics regularly releasing new hours of jokes on a dizzying array of platforms, none more aggressively than Netflix. The streaming service transformed the stand-up market by luring seemingly every big-name star back to the stage with staggering paydays that HBO and Comedy Central could not match. After vanishing from the national spotlight for over a decade, Dave Chappelle released five different new hours of comedy. Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres and Adam Sandler made high-profile returns. Even Eddie Murphy recently announced he was going to make his first new special in three decades.

But the special’s growing significance also proved to be a sturdy springboard to fame for comics like Ali Wong and Hannah Gadsby, whose bracing hours of comedy set the cultural conversation in ways that comedy movies rarely do these days. And as the special became more prestigious, its ambitions rose. Comics explored darker themes and experimented with form, integrating fictional characters or documentary elements, playing vast arenas or dispensing with the audience altogether. But the most telling sign of a boom is how many in comedy are now talking about a looming bust. Don’t count on it, though.

When it comes to artistic creation, the line between fiction and reality has always been blurred — by definition. (“Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert said.) But in the 2010s, the genre of “autofiction,” in which a novel’s autobiographical details are showily transparent, surged in popularity. All six volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” were translated into English over the past decade. That series, in sheer weight and also in the way it corresponds on an almost infinitesimal level with Knausgaard’s life, might now be the sun in this genre’s planetary system. For lives more refit for art’s purposes, there was Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, which followed a mordantly observant writer much like Cusk, and Ben Lerner’s loose trilogy of novels (“Leaving the Atocha Station,” “10:04” and “The Topeka School”) about a writer, high school debater and son of psychologists who is Lerner in thin disguise. Sheila Heti, Jenny Offill and Édouard Louis also contributed to the genre’s rapidly expanding shelf. Did Elena Ferrante? That depends on who she really is.

On Feb. 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump appeared on his last episode of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” On June 15, 2015, he called in for the last installment of “Mondays With Trump,” a weekly segment he had been doing on “Fox & Friends” for four years. The next day, with a campaign announcement at Trump Tower, he began a new TV show that we are still very much living in.

President Trump’s election ratified the power of TV stardom, by itself, as a route to ultimate power. He had previously occupied no national office besides the “Apprentice” boardroom, represented no constituency but Fox News. His campaign drew on the pop-culture persona he had built since the 1980s — braggart, reality-show tough guy, insult comic — and benefited from billions of dollars’ worth of free media from news outlets agog at the spectacle. And his presidency was in many ways controlled by TV; he binged it, live-tweeted it, was continually goaded by it.

Years before, John F. Kennedy won office by winning a TV debate, Ronald Reagan honed his chops on “General Electric Theater” and Bill Clinton blew sax for Arsenio Hall. But with the elevation of the host of “The Apprentice” to the leader of the free world, TV ceased being merely a window into the White House. It was now the front door.

If you didn’t have a fan army in the 2010s, you may not have had any fans at all. The diva-adjacent groups (Beyoncé’s BeyHive, Gaga’s Little Monsters, Nicki’s Barbz, Ariana’s Arianators, Taylor’s Swifties and so on) get most of the oxygen — to say nothing of the adjacent Star Wars/Marvel/“Game of Thrones”/red-pilled, post-Gamergate “Ghostbuster”-protecting legions — niche fan communities with a vigilante bent have proliferated on social media, from not-quite-pop-stars (Tyler, the Creator, Charli XCX) to politicians polling in the low single-digits. (Even Deadheads are back with a digital vengeance.) This made for both life-affirming online community-building and all kinds of Twitter and Instagram mobs, as celebrities realized they could deploy a cascade of eager defenders with a single @-reply.

But while the swarms of stans -- named for the homicidal Eminem obsessive who won’t stop sending the rapper letters in the turn-of-the-millennium hit -- too often defaulted to fanatical allegiance to the rich and famous, the groups also put knowledge and sleuthing at a premium. In the face of a depleted entertainment press, obsessive fans, be they K-pop converts or the Scorsese faithful, have been known to sniff out details on surprise new releases, decode paparazzi shots and break down commercial performance with a degree of sophistication that goes beyond pure zealotry. The Bad Stans may still drown out the Good Stans, but both make the internet more compelling.