The Spirit of 2006

John Fetterman and the lost era of the feisty, not-that-ideological Dem

Everyone is fated to grow up and become a nostalgia-addled middle-aged person, as I was recently reminded when listening to the “2006 Movie Draft” episode of my favorite podcast, The Big Picture.

You see, 2006 happens to have been the year when I was at my very peak consumption of cultural products. No wife, no girlfriend, stagnating a little bit professionally. Netflix didn’t do streaming yet. I lived with a bunch of roommates in a kind of gross house and went to the movies (and the 9:30 Club and the Black Cat) a lot with whichever friends were up for doing something, or sometimes just by myself. Was that genuinely the best year ever for American cinema? Probably not. But I have a particular personal relationship to movies I saw that year and feel nostalgic for that time.

But precisely because I have a special relationship to that time, I can recommend some good 2006 films across a variety of genres. There were some bangers!

I was reminded of all this when I saw that John Fetterman e…