Born in 2005

If you were born in 2005, you arrived in the year that Hurricane Katrina stripped away the comfortable American myth that this couldn't happen here. On August 29th, the storm made landfall near New Orleans, and the levees broke, and the city flooded, and the Superdome became a holding pen for tens of thousands of stranded, increasingly desperate people while the federal response moved with catastrophic slowness. The footage from rooftops and the convention center—people waiting, asking why help hadn't come—was a national shame that crossed every political line.

Eighty percent of New Orleans was underwater. Fifteen hundred people died. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," the president said to FEMA director Michael Brown, and the phrase became shorthand for everything that had failed.

The year also gave you: YouTube, which launched in February and began its quiet revolution of how humans consumed video. *Brokeback Mountain* made awards season complicated. Kanye West's *Late Registration* and the White Stripes' *Get Behind Me Satan* were the year's records.

*March of the Penguins* was the surprise documentary hit. The iPod nano arrived in September—impossibly thin, impossibly small. The country was increasingly sorting itself into partisan teams, the two Americas finding it harder to share a channel, let alone a conversation.