As the 21st century was getting underway, Hollywood released a series of films that were daring, entertaining, and absolutely unmissable.

Films like, 25th Hour, Bring It On, Zodiac, and No Country for Old Men.

They arrived during the George W. Bush era, a chaotic time in America.

Think 9-11, Katrina, the mortgage crisis. After the Bush era, a chaotic time in America. Think 9-11, Katrina, the mortgage crisis. After the Bush

years, the country would never be the same, and neither would Hollywood. I'm Brian Raftery,

and in my new limited series, Mission Accomplished, we're going to dive into some of the biggest

movies of the Bush years, and look at what they said about the state of the nation.

We'll go behind the scenes with filmmakers and experts

and relive some of your favorite movies from the early 2000s,

from Donnie Darko to Michael Clayton, from Anchorman to Iron Man.

So slip on your sketchers, dig out your old Nokia,

and join me from Mission Accomplished, starting August 12th on the big picture feed.

Today, America's personality shift. Every few decades, it seems, the Western world seems to experience a social crisis in the face of new technology.

120 years ago, as I wrote in a recent Substack essay, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the U.S.

gradually made its way across the Atlantic. The doctor George Miller Beard called it called it nuresphenia, or nervous exhaustion.

Europeans at the time in the 1900s sometimes referred to it as American nervousness, or even

New Yorkitis. According to Beard, the affliction was most common among, quote, the indoor

classes of civilized civilizations, end quote.

That is to say, the illness mostly affected white-collar workers operating at the frontier of technology, handling new, fast machines.

And at the time, there were plenty of things in America that were fast and new.

In 1875, there were no skyscrapers, no electric lighting, no Coca-Cola or basketball, few bicycles,

no aspirin, no cars or sneakers, no cardboard boxes, no hamburgers or Kodak cameras or recorded music players. By 1905, just 30 years later,

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