In the fall of 1999, The New Yorker published a short piece about a twenty-three-year-old writer who had just released her first novel, in England. Zadie Smiths White Teeth was due to be published in the U.S. in the spring of 2000kicking off the millennium with a bang. White Teeth, a gentle satire of migration and cultural identity, concerns, among other matters, Nazi eugenics programs, the eschatology of Jehovahs Witnesses, the DNA of mice, and a militant group called Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, or KEVIN, the piece, by Kevin Jackson, observes. Smith writes like an old hand, and, sometimes, like a dream. It can be immensely pleasurable, years later, to revisit the initial discovery of new talents and works of art, the people and projects that gave a decade its own flavor and Zeitgeist.

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This week, were bringing you a selection of piecesa culture review, of sortsthat capture the creative pulse of the early two-thousands. In Dont Look Back and New Frontiers, Anthony Lane explores the mind-bending machinations of Michel Gondrys Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the spare poignancy of Ang Lees Brokeback Mountain. (Brokeback Mountain, which began as an Annie Proulx story in these pages, comes fully alive as the chance for happiness dies. Its beauty wells from its sorrow.) In Flesh on Flesh, John Updike reviews Atonement, Ian McEwans majestic novel of unfulfilled love. (The frail, moist flesh, mutilated in war, corseted and shamed in peacetime, and subject, in the long view, to swift decay, gives this intricately composed narrative its mournful, surging life.) In Living Pains, Sasha Frere-Jones considers Mary J. Bliges accomplished career as she releases her eighth studio album. In Under the Spell and Counterlives, Joan Acocella delves into the phenomenon of the Harry Potter series and analyzes the far-reaching themes of Philip Roths The Plot Against America. (In an eerie conversion, The Plot Against America transforms the piety-spouting, finger-shaking elders of the Roth oeuvre into prophets.) In Sympathy for the Devil, Kelefa Sanneh studies the shifting musical styles of the rapper Eminem. Finally, in Heartbreak Hotels, David Denby examines how Sofia Coppola captures the loneliness and humor of Bill Murrays faded movie-star character in Lost in Translation. Coppola doesnt punch up her scenes; shes not interested in tension leading to a climax but in moods and states of being, Denby writes. Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell.

Erin Overbey, archive editor

Ian McEwans semi-Austenesque novel, Atonement.

At twenty-three, the author has had the nerve to ignore her misgivings and produce her dbut novel, White Teeth.

Philip Roths The Plot Against America.

Brokeback Mountain and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lost in Translation and Dirty Pretty Things.

Eminem pleads his case.

Harry Potter explained.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Mary J. Bliges chronic brilliance.

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Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts - The New Yorker