Born in 1993

If you were born in 1993, you came into a country in transition—the Clinton years beginning with a kind of boomer energy, tech optimism, and the sense that America's long post-Cold War adjustment might actually lead somewhere good. The World Wide Web was still barely a thing but Mosaic, the first web browser, was released in January and the patient zero of a pandemic was out in the world. Schindler's List and *Jurassic Park* were both Steven Spielberg films in the same year, one a profound moral reckoning and one a magnificent technical spectacle, and audiences filled the theaters for both.

*Sleepless in Seattle* made romantic comedies feel like Meg Ryan's personal domain. Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" was inescapable, from every radio in every store. The World Trade Center was bombed in February—a van in the underground garage—and the attack killed six and injured a thousand.

It was horrifying and then somehow it faded from the national consciousness in a way that seems strange in retrospect. The Branch Davidian siege at Waco ended in fire in April. NAFTA was signed in December over enormous labor union objection.

The national debt clock in Times Square was ticking. The Beanie Baby was being developed in Naperville, Illinois, about to change the American relationship with stuffed animals. The flannel was still everywhere, the coffee shops were multiplying, and Seattle seemed to be running the culture.