Born in 1991

If you were born in 1991, you arrived in the year the Cold War came to its formal end—the Soviet Union dissolved on Christmas Day, Gorbachev resigning, fifteen new republics formed from the ruins of empire. America had won, though the winning felt strange, disorienting, and expensive. The Gulf War began in January with the most telegenic military campaign in history—CNN's live coverage from Baghdad, the green night-vision footage of cruise missiles, the hundredth hour press conferences—and ended in a hundred hours of ground combat, Kuwait liberated, Saddam Hussein still in power.

Rodney King was beaten by LA police on March 3rd; a bystander filmed it on a home video camera and the footage played on television for months, a fracture in American life laid bare. Nirvana's *Nevermind* arrived in September and *Smells Like Teen Spirit* made every previous guitar band sound slightly embarrassed. The flannel shirt, the ripped jeans—grunge had arrived from Seattle with a wet, distorted roar.

Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive in November and changed the AIDS conversation overnight, bringing it out of the shadows into the mainstream. *The Silence of the Lambs* swept the Oscars. The World Wide Web became publicly available and nobody had any idea what that meant yet.

The country was triumphant, sobering, and beginning to grapple with what it actually was.