Born in 1998

If you were born in 1998, you arrived in the year the president was impeached over a relationship with a White House intern, and the country had the strangest year of public discourse in recent memory. The Starr Report was released on the internet and millions downloaded it, reading the blue passages in offices and on home computers while the evening news ran unprecedented reports about the president's personal behavior. Clinton was impeached in December by the House but not convicted by the Senate.

Meanwhile: the economy was extraordinary, the stock market was vertiginous, unemployment was at its lowest in twenty-four years, and a twenty-two-year-old kid named Mark McGwire was chasing Roger Maris's home run record while the whole country stopped work every afternoon to watch. He hit sixty-two in September and the roar from the stadium could be heard everywhere. *Saving Private Ryan* redefined the war film and *The Big Lebowski* found a small and devoted audience that would grow for decades.

Google was incorporated in September by two Stanford PhD students in a Menlo Park garage. Titanic won eleven Oscars. "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" and "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" were on every radio.

Furby arrived in toy stores and sold eighteen million units before Christmas. The Y2K clock was already ticking in the background, a vague existential anxiety that the computers would stop working at midnight on January 1, 2000.