Born in 1995

If you were born in 1995, you came into a year shaped by violence and by the beginnings of the digital world. On April 19th, a truck bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children in the daycare—at the time the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history, and it was a domestic terrorist, which made people think hard about the anger in the country's heartland.

The O.J. Simpson verdict came in October and the country split almost perfectly along racial lines in its reaction, a split that was more honest than comfortable.

Toy Story opened in November—the first fully computer-animated feature film—and Pixar changed movies forever. The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia died in August and the lot behind every arena full of Deadheads seemed to go quiet. Windows 95 launched with a massive marketing campaign—the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up," Bill Gates in a bow tie—and computers were finally being sold as consumer products, not business tools.

Amazon opened its website in July, selling books, its homepage a plain gray thing that nobody would have guessed was the beginning of something enormous. *Clueless* and *Apollo 13* and *Braveheart* were at the multiplex. "Waterfalls" by TLC.

"Gangsta's Paradise" by Coolio. Alanis Morissette's *Jagged Little Pill* in every dorm room. The internet was becoming something you used every day.