Born in 1982

If you were born in 1982, you arrived in a year when the recession was biting hard—unemployment was nearly eleven percent, the highest since the Depression—and yet the culture was producing some of the most beloved artifacts of the decade. *E.T.

* was in theaters all summer and into the fall, Spielberg making everyone cry in the dark. Michael Jackson's *Thriller* was released in November and became the best-selling album of all time, "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" redefining what pop music could do. The Falklands War was a brief, distant conflict that reminded Americans how strange British imperial instincts still were.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington in November—Maya Lin's long black wall with fifty-eight thousand names—and veterans who'd been ignored or worse for a decade finally had a place to come and grieve. The first artificial heart was implanted in Barney Clark at the University of Utah. USA Today launched with its color pie charts and short stories, and newspaper people argued about whether it was journalism or not.

The synthesizer sound was everywhere—men with excellent hair playing keyboards in music videos that MTV was running around the clock. The Commodore 64 home computer went on sale for $595. The first CD players arrived in stores.

Time magazine named the computer its "Machine of the Year," replacing the usual Man of the Year. The world was changing on fast-forward.