Born in 2020

If you were born in 2020, you were born into the strangest year in living American memory. COVID-19 arrived in the United States in January and was downplayed, then could not be downplayed, and by March the schools had closed, the restaurants had closed, the streets had emptied, and Americans were learning the word "pandemic" in a new and terrible register. The economy lost twenty-two million jobs in March and April alone.

The death toll climbed through one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand before the year ended. From the living rooms and kitchen tables where everyone was suddenly working and studying, the murder of George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner on May 25th—a police officer's knee on his neck for nine minutes while bystanders filmed on their phones—sent tens of millions of Americans into the streets in the largest protest movement in the country's history. "I can't breathe.

" The summer was both plague and reckoning. The November election between Trump and Biden was the most voted-in election in American history—one hundred fifty-nine million votes—and Biden won both the popular vote and the electoral college. The results were disputed and the weeks that followed were tense and strange.

The vaccines were in development, racing through trials, holding the year's last hope. The country was exhausted, unmoored, and not yet done.