Born in 1999

If you were born in 1999, you arrived at the end of a century with the lights still on and the party still going. The economy was running at full throttle—dot-com millionaires were everywhere, IPOs were making secretaries into paper millionaires, and the NASDAQ was climbing like a rocket. Everyone was online now, or almost everyone, and the web had remade how you found information, how you bought things, how you listened to music.

Napster launched in June and the music industry began its long, catastrophic confrontation with free. *The Matrix* arrived in March and made everyone feel like they might be living in a simulation. The Columbine high school shooting in April sent the country into grief and argument that would repeat, terribly, again and again.

*The Sixth Sense* was the movie everyone was discussing—"I see dead people"—and the secret was being whispered in every office. The Sopranos debuted on HBO in January and the golden age of prestige television had arrived without fanfare. Woodstock '99 descended into fires and violence and served as an uncomfortable mirror.

TRL on MTV was the cultural center of teenage life, Carson Daly counting down the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync. The Y2K preparations were underway—companies spending billions, survivalists stockpiling canned goods—and when midnight came on January 1, 2000, the lights stayed on and people laughed with relief and went back to dancing.