The Nineties

According to bestselling author Chuck Klosterman – author of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Eating the Dinosaur – the dominant spirit of the 1990s was apathy amid a swamp of events, personalities and attitudes in politics, pop culture and technology. He identifies links through the decade connecting Nirvana, the internet, baseball, Bill Clinton and Y2K. Klosterman does not offer a linear history or coherent chronology. His essays portray an era when the prevailing attitude was a self-conscious merging of ambivalence and irony.

Ironic Apathy

In the 1990s, the United States experienced its longest period of economic expansion. Unemployment hit a peak in 1992, then declined for the rest of the decade.