Born in 2004

If you were born in 2004, you came into a country at war and uncertain about it. The Abu Ghraib photographs were published in April—American soldiers posing with hooded, naked prisoners—and the moral cost of the Iraq War became suddenly and grotesquely visible. The 9/11 Commission report came out and reconstructed the failures of imagination that had allowed the attacks to happen.

John Kerry ran against George Bush in the closest presidential election since 2000, and Bush won with 51 percent, the first popular vote majority since 1988. The Fahrenheit 9/11 documentary was the highest-grossing documentary in history. *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind* and *Sideways* were the smaller films everyone was recommending.

Facebook launched in February in Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room, initially restricted to college students, and immediately the social network began its long rewiring of human connection. The first Red Sox World Series win in eighty-six years sent Boston into a particular paroxysm of joy that felt genuinely earned. The Indian Ocean tsunami on December 26th killed two hundred and thirty thousand people and charity donations poured out of America in unprecedented volume.

Gas was creeping toward $2 a gallon. The housing market was running very hot and the loans being written to finance it were beginning to look worrying to anyone paying attention.