Born in 2002

If you were born in 2002, you arrived in the year that America was processing its grief, fury, and determination in equal and sometimes contradictory measure. The War in Afghanistan was underway. The drums of a possible war in Iraq were beginning to sound.

The Department of Homeland Security was created. The color-coded terror threat system—green, blue, yellow, orange, red—was introduced and would live on airport walls for years. The Enron and WorldCom scandals collapsed in succession, billions of dollars of fraud, thousands of workers' 401(k)s destroyed overnight, the corporate culture of the nineties looking suddenly like a con.

*Spider-Man* opened in May and the summer blockbuster was back with its original energy. *The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers* was the serious Christmas picture. Eminem, Nelly, and Avril Lavigne were on the radio in different registers of teenage feeling.

American Idol debuted in June on Fox with Simon Cowell's savage precision and was immediately the most watched show on television. The Washington D.C.

sniper attacks paralyzed the mid-Atlantic for three weeks in October. The housing market was quietly inflating in ways economists were starting to notice. Everybody had email.

Nobody had texted yet. The flip phone was the pinnacle of communication technology. Normal American life was resuming, carefully, around its new anxieties.