Born in 2007

If you were born in 2007, you came into the last year before the great unraveling. The economy was at its peak—housing prices still rising, Wall Street firms still posting record profits, unemployment low—but the subprime mortgage crisis was a phrase beginning to appear in the business pages, and the instruments that Wall Street had invented to package those loans were starting to wobble. The iPhone launched on June 29th—Steve Jobs had announced it in January with that still-extraordinary presentation—and the lines outside the Apple Store were a hundred people deep in every city.

The device in their hands would rewire human behavior in ways nobody was fully prepared to articulate. *No Country for Old Men* and *There Will Be Blood* were the year's films, both dark in their particular ways about American money and American violence. J.

K. Rowling published the final Harry Potter, and the midnight book release parties in every bookstore were genuinely sweet. The last episode of The Sopranos went to black and people argued about it for years.

Radiohead released *In Rainbows* on a pay-what-you-want model and the music industry argument accelerated. Virginia Tech. The I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

The writers' strike in November. The country was about to find out, in the fall of 2008, just how much of its prosperity had been borrowed, literally.