I’m a baby millennial, so my experience of the Y2K is largely the experience of childhood — I was only four when the millennium turned and in middle school when Barack Obama was elected president.

That said, I still feel a powerful nostalgia for the early aughts and late ’90s: nostalgia for the internet without social media, for the soft power ballads of Train, and for thriving shopping malls.

The pull of that nostalgia has become increasingly powerful as I approach 30 next month. That’s part of why I was so excited to read “Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything” by local author Colette Shade.

Shade spent part of her teenage years in the Baltimore suburbs and today lives in Towson. Before moving to Towson, she lived in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon. “Y2K” is her first published collection of essays, and her writing has been featured in publications including The New Republic and The Nation.

The essays in her new book combine memoir with reporting and historical research. It’s funny and thoughtful, and includes topics from the cruelty of celebrity gossip to the War on Terror to exploring how the Y2K era — defined by Shade as 1997-2008 — shaped the world today.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Cody Boteler: Where did you write Y2K? Were there any local places you went for inspiration?

Collette Shade: I got the book deal in 2022, and was living in a Towson apartment, and pretty much just wrote it at my kitchen table. I don’t really work well in coffee shops because I like to pace around a lot while I work. I did do some editing work at Red Emma’s, who I thank in the acknowledgments both for supporting my work for many, many, many years and promoting “Y2K” and giving me a place to do that and for giving me book recommendations, many of which became sources or inspiration for “Y2K.”

Is there anything about the Baltimore you’ve lived in, or spent time in, or the Baltimore you live in now, that feel especially Y2K to you, today?

I feel like Ducky Dynamo’s doing a lot of interesting work around preserving the heritage of Baltimore club music. She was very involved in maintaining a club on Charles Street that was very big in the era, and bringing it back as a means of preserving the cultural heritage of that, so feels very Y2K for me.

I mean, in general, I see a lot of, like, MICA [Maryland Institute College of Art] kids and kids around town wearing Y2K fashion, although that’s everywhere. I’m walking around and I’m like, “You are 13 and you’re wearing JNCOs — what is going on?”

That’s kind of also why I wrote the book, though, because I wanted to kind of give a little more context of these trends and that history to people who are younger and you know might be curious about where those trends came from.

One of the essays in your book is a chapter about Starbucks. Do you have a favorite coffee spot in Baltimore or Baltimore County?

Good Neighbor, on Falls Road. I just think of it as the bean place, but I do love Good Neighbor, for sure. The coffee is very strong and high quality. The whole ambience is immaculate, the furniture is very cozy. I love sitting in the big outdoor area when it’s, you know, not 20 degrees outside.

In the book you also mentioned that you’ll still go to a Starbucks sometimes, even though your coffee tastes have evolved since the Y2K era. Do you have a favorite local Starbucks?

I haven’t been to one in a really long time. But if you really wanna get nostalgic, the one that I talk about in the book is the one in Towson, across from the university, that has a drive-through and I actually haven’t been to this one in many many years. When I talked about my preferred Starbucks in the book, that’s the one I’m talking about, that’s the one I loved to go to and show up late to my high school government class with a cup.

You write, in the book, about going to a high school in the Baltimore suburbs, and some of the casual racism and homophobia that were seen as jokes during the era. You also talk about how you later learned about Howard Cooper, a Black teenager who was lynched in Towson in 1885. I’m curious what the experiencing of learning about Howard years later was, as someone who went to school in the area.

I learned much later, I want to say it was around 2016. It was shocking because I went to high school near there, and the farm where Cooper worked is very close to where my parents live, and to where my brother went to high school.

I was like, this is horrifying, it made me think about the place very differently. I wasn’t planning to do anything with that information, it was just in my head.

As I was writing this essay, many years later, about these white guys who had a quote unquote “comedy rap” group at my high school, it just always made me a little uneasy, in a sense. I wanted to try to sort of understand why it might be that it made me uneasy.

This isn’t about blaming, or saying, ‘They were being racist on purpose!’ I don’t know. I’m just trying to make sense of something that I remember. I was writing this essay in 2023, and it popped into my head that, ‘Wow, they’re doing this thing that is kind of like minstrelsy to me, not far from the spot where a teenage boy, basically their age, was lynched. I felt that I had to include it.

It seemed significant to me there was this big push to put up a marker outside the Towson jail, but it seemed significant that happened in the 2010s, because in the Y2K era, one of the things I argue in the book is that it was this apolitical era, where people thought they didn’t need to learn history because we fixed all the problems.

In the 2010s, it was very different, and you had people saying “Hey, there continues to be a lot of injustice in our society.”