Born in 1965

If you were born in 1965, you came into a country that was being pulled in opposite directions with enormous force. Fifty thousand American troops were in Vietnam by year's end, and the nightly news was bringing the war into the living room in an entirely new way—body counts and rice paddies and burning villages between commercials for Tide and Chevrolet. The Watts riots in Los Angeles in August were five days of fire and fury that forced a reckoning nobody was quite ready for.

The Voting Rights Act passed, a landmark, a promise, though the gap between promise and reality was visible to anyone paying attention. And yet the culture was electric: the Beatles played Shea Stadium and barely a note could be heard over the screaming of fifty-five thousand people. Bob Dylan plugged in at Newport and half the folk crowd booed and half realized music had just changed.

The Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks—the British Invasion kept rolling. "Satisfaction" was the sound of the year. The Selectric typewriter, the Pontiac GTO muscle car, the first commercial satellite TV transmission—the future was arriving on multiple tracks simultaneously.

*The Sound of Music* played in theaters for two years. Color television was now in thirty-six percent of homes. Life felt urgent and contested and alive.