Born in 1967

If you were born in 1967, you arrived in what people would later call the Summer of Love—one hundred thousand young people converging on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, flowers in their hair, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane providing the soundtrack. The counterculture that had been building for years boiled over into full spectacle, and middle America watched in a complicated mixture of alarm, bewilderment, and occasional fascination. The Beatles released Sgt.

Pepper's in June and it remade what an album could be—you didn't just listen to it, you sat with it, stared at the cover, read every word. Aretha Franklin's "Respect" arrived and owned the summer. Thurgood Marshall became the first Black Supreme Court Justice.

The Detroit riot in July was the most destructive in American history to that point. Muhammad Ali refused the draft and was stripped of his title. The first Super Bowl was played in January, the Packers defeating the Chiefs, and barely anyone noticed it would become the biggest single-day sporting event in the world.

The Doors, the Who, Janis Joplin—rock was becoming something vast and complicated and loud. A McDonald's hamburger cost eighteen cents. The country was being pulled between the diner and the commune, between the sock hop and the be-in, and the tension was exhilarating and frightening all at once.