At the New Yorker‘s “Currency” blog, Vauhini Vara and Vijith Assar have published “What the Dow Tells Us About Ourselves,” a fun, interactive timeline that explains how companies were viewed in America in the year they were added or subtracted from the Dow. From “1991 through 2004”:

“It’s easy to forget that the late eighties and early nineties saw as strong a backlash against consumer culture as we’ve seen in the post-Vietnam era: it was in those years, remember, that Nirvana and Clerks happened. It also happened to be the period in which the Dow added both McDonalds and Walt Disney, two of the era’s most memorable symbols of capitalism’s effect on our culture. By the time Walt Disney joined, in 1991—the year it released Beauty and the Beast—the company had long been seen in some quarters as an evil empire. In a 2006 article for the magazine, Anthony Lane, quoting a 1971 broadside by the writer and activist Ariel Dorfman, wrote, ‘Disney has somehow become shorthand for the cushioning with which, knowingly or otherwise, we protect and console ourselves against experience: ‘All the conflicts of the real world, the nerve centers of bourgeois society, are purified in the imagination in order to be absorbed and co-opted into the world of entertainment.’’ (The broadside’s title: How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.) By the end of the nineties, of course, people were distracted by a new trend in consumer culture: the rise of the technology industry, which brought Hewlett-Packard to the average in 1997, followed by Microsoft and Intel in 1999.”