80: 90

To have been a young adult on the 80/90 cusp was to live with a particular kind of cognitive dissonance. You were raised on the Reagan/Thatcher gospel of individual ambition and material success. But you came of age in the shadow of a recession (early 90s), a savings-and-loan crisis, and the first stirrings of corporate downsizing. The result was a generation—later labeled "X"—defined less by rebellion and more by a detached, sarcastic pragmatism. The slogan of the cusp wasn't "Tune in, turn on, drop out"; it was "Whatever."

This was the golden age of "mixed media." A teenager might listen to a cassette tape of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), dub it for a friend on a dual-deck boombox, and then switch to a CD of Depeche Mode’s Violator (1990). Information came from newspapers and magazines, but also from nascent bulletin board systems (BBSs) accessed via a screeching 2400-baud modem. The cusp generation was the last to experience the friction of research—the microfiche reader, the card catalog, the physical encyclopedia—and the first to sense its imminent obsolescence. To have been a young adult on the

Culturally, the 80/90 cusp is a story of dramatic reaction. The early 80s had been an era of conspicuous consumption, power suits, and pop maximalism (Michael Jackson, Madonna, hair metal). By 1989, the seams were bursting. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was the ultimate geopolitical symbol of the cusp: the end of a stark, binary Cold War order and the messy, hopeful beginning of a unipolar world. Yet that hope was immediately shadowed by a new anxiety—the AIDS crisis, which had moved from a fringe tragedy to a mainstream specter, fundamentally altering the carefree ethos of the previous decade. The cusp generation was the last to experience