About

This is a retrospective chronicle of the 2020s.

Inspired by Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday (1931), which told the story of the 1920s not through the lens of great men and official history, but through the changing texture of everyday American life — what people talked about, worried over, got excited by, and forgot.

A hundred years later, we’re living through another decade that future historians will spend careers trying to make sense of. A pandemic that reshaped how we live and work. Political upheaval that tested institutions. Cultural reckonings that changed what we talk about and how. And the rise of artificial intelligence, whose consequences we’re only beginning to understand.

Only Yesterday tries to capture what it felt like to live through all of this — not with the benefit of hindsight, but in something close to real time. The small details alongside the big events. The mood of the moment. The things that seemed important at the time, whether or not they turned out to be.

It’s informal history, written as it happens.