Born in 2018

If you were born in 2018, you arrived in a year when American high school students led the most significant protest movement since the sixties. The Parkland school shooting in February—seventeen students killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida—produced a generation of seventeen-year-old activists who took their grief onto the stage of the March for Our Lives in Washington in March with a clarity and moral force that made the adults around them look small. The gun control argument, usually exhausted within weeks of each shooting, was sustained longer than usual, though the legislative outcomes were again limited.

The #MeToo movement was still radiating outward, transforming industries and newsrooms and studios. The Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings in September were a national trauma, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony and Kavanaugh's fury both searing and painful.

*Black Panther* in February was a cultural milestone—the first Black superhero blockbuster, the Wakanda Forever salute, the box office numbers that rewrote what audiences would show up for. *A Star Is Born* was the fall's great emotional experience. *Crazy Rich Asians* was the Asian-American moment in Hollywood.

Childish Gambino's "This Is America" video was the year's most-discussed cultural artifact. The economy was strong, unemployment at record lows, but the unease was also real and structural and not going away.