2007
iPhone unveiled
Steve Jobs walked onstage at Macworld in San Francisco in his black turtleneck and demonstrated a slab of glass that combined a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator. The audience laughed at first, then gasped. The keyboard vanished, the app store followed, and within five years the entire planet had a supercomputer in its pocket.
Benazir Bhutto assassinated
Pakistan's twice-elected former prime minister was leaving a campaign rally in Rawalpindi when a young man fired at her motorcade and detonated his suicide vest. She died on the way to the hospital. The Bhutto dynasty, the army, and the Islamists all blamed each other, and Pakistan slipped further from itself.
Harry Potter ends
At midnight in bookshops from Edinburgh to Manila, children in robes and round glasses lined up to buy the seventh and final volume of J.K. Rowling's saga. Fifteen million copies sold in twenty-four hours. A generation that had grown up with Harry closed the book and tried to figure out what to read next.
Subprime cracks appear
American mortgage lenders began collapsing through 2007 as the housing bubble peaked and Wall Street's exotic mortgage-backed securities started to lose their AAA ratings one by one. Bear Stearns hedge funds imploded in the summer, wiping out investors. Hardly anyone outside finance noticed or understood the contagion. The fuse of the global financial crisis was already burning.