2008
Lehman Brothers collapses
The 158-year-old investment bank filed for bankruptcy on a Monday morning, the largest in American history. Subprime mortgages had eaten its books and Washington declined to throw a rope this time. The global financial system seized within hours, credit markets froze worldwide, and by week's end the Treasury was preparing the largest bailout in history.
Beijing Olympics open
Zhang Yimou's spectacular opening ceremony unfurled five thousand years of Chinese civilization in fireworks, two thousand and eight synchronized drummers, and enormous animated scrolls before a global television audience of a billion. On the same day, Russian tanks rolled into Georgia. Michael Phelps would win eight golds and Usain Bolt would sprint into legend, but the lasting message was geopolitical: China had arrived.
Mumbai attacks
Ten Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen arrived by inflatable boat from Karachi and spent three days murdering their way through luxury hotels, a Jewish center, and the city's main railway station, using automatic weapons and grenades. One hundred sixty-six died. The Taj Mahal hotel burned on live television and India and Pakistan once again came close to war.
Obama wins the presidency
A first-term senator with a Kenyan father and a middle name of Hussein became the forty-fourth president of the United States. Grant Park in Chicago filled with weeping strangers. The country that had counted slaves as three-fifths of a person had elected a Black man to its highest office in a single lifetime.
Bitcoin whitepaper appears
An anonymous coder calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine-page paper to a cryptography mailing list, describing a peer-to-peer electronic cash system without a central bank or any trusted intermediary. The first block was mined in January. Most readers ignored it. A new asset class, and a new ideology of decentralized finance, were quietly born.
Sichuan earthquake
A magnitude 7.9 quake shook the mountains of central China, killing nearly 90,000 people and burying entire schools whose shoddy construction, with rebar replaced by wire, soon became a national scandal. For a few weeks the Chinese state allowed unusual openness about its grief and its failures. Then the Olympics arrived and the censors returned.
Android arrives
T-Mobile launched the G1, the first phone to run Google's open-source Android operating system, to a modest reception. It was clunky and homely next to Apple's sleek iPhone, but free for any manufacturer to use and customize. Within five years Android had eaten three quarters of the global smartphone market. The mobile era's second great platform was born.