As an understocked purveyor of large dried fruit might say, we're out of big dates for a while. The Orwellian 1984 came and went, we partied like it was 1999, the most ominous monoliths in 2001 turned out to be ideological and the Clarkesque follow-up of 2010 recently ended without interplanetary incident. We have another five centuries before we judge the prescience of Zager and Evans, if we are still alive. We are thus left with 2011, a seemingly nondescript little year-except that the New York Times saw fit to publish predictions about it back in 1931. That year marked the Times's 80th anniversary, so the editors thought it made sense to ask intellectual luminaries of the time to gaze into a future an equal period away, which, if you do the math right and don't engage in any major Gregorian-style calendar recalibrations, gives you 2011.
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