Born in 2019

If you were born in 2019, you arrived in the last year before everything changed, though that's only clear in retrospect. The country was prosperous—unemployment at fifty-year lows, the stock market near records—and yet the political temperature was at a sustained boil. The Mueller report was released in April and its conclusions, depending on your priors, were either damning or exonerating.

The first impeachment of Donald Trump began in September, centered on a phone call to Ukraine, and proceeded on a party-line vote in December. Notre Dame Cathedral burned in April and the world watched in grief. The College Admissions scandal—wealthy parents paying enormous bribes to get their children into elite universities—felt like a parable written by central casting.

*Avengers: Endgame* was the culmination of twenty-one films over eleven years and people wept in theaters. *Parasite* won the Oscar for Best Picture, the first non-English-language film to do so. Greta Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic to address the UN about climate change and became either a heroine or a target depending on where you sat.

Streaming had definitively won—the last Blockbuster on Earth was still open in Bend, Oregon, but it was a museum now. TikTok was arriving and the short-form video was becoming the new dominant medium. People were living their lives on Instagram and arguing on Twitter and ordering everything from Amazon.

A vague, pre-storm quiet.