2016
Trump elected president
A real estate developer and reality TV star with no political experience defeated Hillary Clinton, winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by nearly three million. Coastal newsrooms gasped. The polls had been wrong, the assumptions had been wrong, and a kind of American politics no one had a name for began.
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol
DeepMind's neural network defeated the world's strongest human Go player four games to one in a Seoul hotel ballroom. Move 37 of game two stunned commentators with its alien beauty. A game that experts had said was a decade away from machine mastery was over. A new kind of intelligence had arrived.
Brexit referendum
By 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent, British voters chose to leave the European Union in a referendum that stunned even many of its advocates. David Cameron resigned by morning. Sterling fell off a cliff. London woke up European, Sunderland woke up sovereign, and a country that had thought of itself as pragmatic discovered it had a populist heart.
Failed Turkish coup
Tanks rolled onto the bridges of Istanbul and jets buzzed Ankara as a faction of the Turkish military tried to overthrow President Erdogan. He addressed the country by FaceTime from a holiday resort, called citizens into the streets, and within hours the coup collapsed in confusion. The purge that followed swept up tens of thousands of soldiers, judges, and teachers.
Rio Olympics open
Rio de Janeiro became the first South American city to host the Summer Games, against a backdrop of Zika virus, political turmoil, and unfinished construction. Usain Bolt completed his triple-triple. The opening ceremony was a love letter to Brazil's mongrel beauty, even as the country was tearing itself apart in the suites upstairs.
Gravitational waves detected
LIGO scientists announced that twin observatories in Louisiana and Washington had felt the ripples in spacetime from two black holes colliding 1.3 billion years ago. Einstein had predicted them a century earlier. The chirp lasted a fifth of a second and opened an entirely new way of listening to the universe.
Pulse nightclub massacre
A 29-year-old gunman swearing allegiance to ISIS opened fire inside a gay nightclub in Orlando during Latin night, killing forty-nine people and wounding fifty-three. It was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. LGBTQ Americans buried friends and the country argued about guns, terror, and identity at once.