Born in 2006

If you were born in 2006, you arrived in a year when the Iraq War had shed its early certainties and was visibly grinding. Sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Iraqis was escalating toward civil war. Bob Woodward's *State of Denial* documented the White House's failure to grapple with reality.

The midterm elections in November gave the Democrats the House and Senate for the first time in twelve years, a clear referendum on the war. Saddam Hussein was hanged on December 30th and it provided no particular sense of closure. Meanwhile: Twitter launched in March and the short-form public statement was invented.

Facebook opened to everyone over thirteen in September. YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in October.

The iPhone was still a year away, but Steve Jobs was already working on it. *Borat* was the comedy hit of the fall, Sacha Baron Cohen's Kazakh reporter exposing the underbelly of American manners. The housing boom was at its absolute peak and the smart money was starting to get nervous.

*An Inconvenient Truth* put climate change on the national agenda more forcefully than before. The Wii launched in November and sold out everywhere, parents camping outside electronics stores. Gas hit $3 a gallon and stayed there.

The country was tired of Iraq and not sure where to put its energy.