The Strangest Time for Nostalgia Is Now

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. National Geographic/Hulu is airing 9/11: One Day in America; MSNBC/Peacock has Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11; HBO has Spike Lee’s somewhat controversial NYC Epicenters. Movies with terrorism plots reportedly got shelved; the increased costs of travel held up movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, which wouldn’t come until 14 years later; Lilo and Stitch, of all things, had to be heavily altered. FX is currently airing its latest American Crime Story installment, about the impeachment of President Clinton and the shifting sexual politics and media landscape that turned it into a talking-head fiasco. There’s a new Matrix movie, the trailer for which dropped this week, making everyone yearn for 1999, even while HBO’s recent Woodstock '99 documentary is there to remind them that it wasn’t exactly the best year on record.