Look Both Ways

This week and the next two, Slate celebrates its 20th anniversary by looking both forward and backward at once. The forward-looking part is The Next 20, in which we asked our writers to find the future in events from the last two decades: the first drone strike, the Nader campaign, an overlooked indie movie from 1996. The rear-gazing side of things is The First 20, which digs into Slate's history and archives; Nathan Heller kicks it off with a characteristically soulful essay asking what a digital magazine's archive even is.