2000
Human genome first draft
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair appeared on linked screens to announce that scientists had drafted the three-billion-letter blueprint of a human being. Craig Venter's private effort and the public consortium called a truce to share credit. The genome turned out smaller and stranger than expected, with far fewer genes than the hundred thousand scientists had predicted.
USS Cole bombed in Aden
Two suicide bombers in a small boat slipped alongside an American destroyer refueling in Yemen and detonated a shaped charge that tore a forty-foot hole in the hull. Seventeen sailors died. Al-Qaeda's name surfaced in intelligence briefings that would soon dominate every wall in Washington, though the warning went largely unheeded until the following September.
Sydney Olympics open
Cathy Freeman lit a cauldron rising from a ring of fire and later ran the four hundred meters in a bodysuit, winning gold for an Australia still arguing about reconciliation with its Aboriginal peoples. Her victory lap, carrying both the Australian and Aboriginal flags, became one of the Games' defining images. The Games were called the best ever organized, a high-water mark before security replaced spectacle.
Bush v. Gore election limbo
Florida's hanging chads and butterfly ballots dragged the American presidency into thirty-six days of recounts, lawsuits, and cable-news chaos that gripped the nation. The Supreme Court halted the counting in a five-to-four decision in December and George W. Bush became president by 537 votes. The faith of half the country in the machinery of democracy quietly cracked.
The dot-com bubble bursts
The Nasdaq peaked in March and then began an eighteen-month slide that erased trillions in paper wealth. Pets.com was liquidated, sock-puppet mascot and all. Hundreds of startups folded within months, and Silicon Valley parking lots emptied. The exuberance of the late nineties curdled into pink slips and shuttered offices, but the underlying internet kept quietly growing.
The Y2K bug fizzles
Programmers and governments had spent billions bracing for digital catastrophe as clocks rolled into a year ending in two zeros, fearing that banking systems, power grids, and air traffic control would fail. Planes stayed aloft, power grids hummed, ATMs dispensed cash. The non-event became a parable about either competent prevention or millennial hysteria, depending on the teller.
AOL buys Time Warner
America's biggest internet provider announced it was buying the world's largest media company in a $165 billion all-stock deal that valued the new century above the old one. Within two years the merger would be considered the worst in corporate history, shedding nearly two hundred billion dollars in value. The dot-com era's hubris had its founding monument.