2006
Twitter takes flight
Jack Dorsey sent a 24-character message reading "just setting up my twttr" from a small San Francisco office. A platform built on enforced brevity would within a decade rewire the metabolism of news, politics, and outrage across the globe. Revolutions and presidencies, careers and reputations, would all soon be made and unmade in 280 characters.
Israel-Hezbollah war
After Hezbollah killed and abducted Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid in July, Israel pounded Lebanon for thirty-four days with airstrikes and a ground invasion while rockets fell on cities across northern Galilee. More than a thousand Lebanese and 158 Israelis died. Hezbollah survived, declared divine victory, and Hassan Nasrallah's portrait went up across the Arab street.
North Korea's first nuclear test
Seismographs in South Korea picked up a small tremor near a remote mountain in North Hamgyong province. Pyongyang announced its first nuclear test. The bang was small, the message was loud, and the Kim regime joined the nuclear club. Future tests would be larger; the diplomacy that followed achieved very little.
Pluto demoted
The International Astronomical Union, meeting in Prague, voted to define a planet in a way that excluded Pluto, which became a "dwarf planet." School posters around the world had to be reprinted. Pluto's defenders dressed in mourning. Solar system politics had never produced this much grief in a single afternoon.
Saddam Hussein hanged
Iraq's deposed dictator was led to a gallows in a Shia neighborhood of Baghdad and hanged at dawn on the first day of Eid al-Adha. Witnesses jeered. A grainy phone video leaked within hours, turning a state execution into a sectarian taunt and deepening the civil war it was meant to end.
PlayStation 3 and the HD console war
Sony and Microsoft's new high-definition consoles, along with Nintendo's motion-controlled Wii, turned video games into a medium that competed seriously with cinema for entertainment dollars and storytelling ambition. Gaming budgets passed Hollywood blockbusters; gaming culture moved from basements into the global mainstream, reshaping how a generation spent its evenings. The medium grew up, awkwardly, in public.