Born in 2021

If you were born in 2021, you arrived in the year that began with the Capitol. On January 6th, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the electoral college results, and the images—the broken windows, the Confederate flag in the rotunda, the rioters in the Senate chamber—were unlike anything in American history. Five people died.

Biden was inaugurated on January 20th with extraordinary security and no crowd. The vaccines rolled out through the winter and spring in a logistical achievement of genuine scale—the CVS and Walgreens lines, the sports stadiums converted to vaccination sites—and by summer the country had partially opened, restaurants filling, masks coming off, a collective exhale. But delta came in the fall and the exhaustion deepened.

The last American troops left Afghanistan in August in a chaotic withdrawal, and the Taliban took Kabul in hours, the twenty-year project ending in footage of desperation at the airport. *Squid Game* on Netflix was the global phenomenon that made American audiences watch subtitles for the first time. Olivia Rodrigo's "drivers license" was the song that felt like a generation announcing itself.

Lil Nas X and Doja Cat. The infrastructure bill passed in November after months of negotiation. The Great Resignation began as people reconsidered their relationship to work in the light of two years of pandemic.

The country was piecing itself back together, unevenly.