Born in 2024

If you were born in 2024, you arrived in the most consequential election year of the modern era—that's what every presidential election year claims to be, but this one made the claim with some justification. Donald Trump was convicted of thirty-four felony counts in New York in May and remained on the ballot. Joe Biden debated him in June in a performance so halting and disoriented that within weeks he had withdrawn from the race, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, who accepted the Democratic nomination in August.

Harris ran a campaign of historic energy and then lost in November, Trump winning the presidency for the second time. The country's divisions were as visible as ever, the maps familiar, the arguments the same but louder. AI had become an everyday presence—in the search results, in the apps, in the customer service calls, in the college essays that faculty were not quite sure how to respond to.

The Eras Tour came to an end after thirty-one months and over a billion dollars in revenue, and the culture felt slightly quieter. Ozempic and its cousins had genuinely and visibly reshaped American bodies and the food and diet industry simultaneously. The cost of living was the animating grievance of American politics—housing unaffordable, groceries expensive, the gap between the comfortable and the struggling as visible as ever.

The country was changing, arguing, struggling, building—as it had always been, and would be.