Born in 2022

If you were born in 2022, you came into a year of whiplash. Russia invaded Ukraine in February in the largest land war in Europe since World War II, and the scenes from Kyiv and Mariupol and Bucha were medieval in their horror. The US and NATO allies flooded Ukraine with weapons and economic support.

The supply chain problems that had begun with COVID were still tangling everything—car dealerships empty, appliance orders months-delayed, the container ships backed up outside every port. Inflation hit nine percent, the highest in forty years, and the Fed began raising interest rates aggressively. Gas hit five dollars a gallon in June and people were furious.

The Supreme Court overturned *Roe v. Wade* in June, ending the constitutional right to abortion after forty-nine years, and the protests and the debate were immediate and intense. The midterm elections in November were expected to produce a red wave and produced instead a modest Republican House majority and a Democratic Senate—largely due to abortion rights ballot measures that passed everywhere they appeared.

*Top Gun: Maverick* was the film summer had been waiting for—Tom Cruise still in the cockpit, the audience still showing up. Taylor Swift's *Midnights* dropped in October in a marketing campaign that broke Spotify records. Wordle became the morning ritual of an entire nation for several months.

The country was tired, expensive, and still recognizably itself.