2018
Khashoggi murdered in Istanbul
The Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi entered his country's consulate in Istanbul to collect papers for his upcoming wedding and never came out. A fifteen-man hit team had flown in that morning from Riyadh carrying a bone saw and sedatives. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denied involvement, then admitted some, then suffered no real consequences.
Cambridge Analytica scandal
Reporting in The Observer and The New York Times revealed that a political consultancy had harvested the data of eighty-seven million Facebook users to build psychological profiles for the Trump campaign. Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress in a booster seat. The first cracks of the techlash spread across the Valley.
Korean leaders meet at the DMZ
Kim Jong Un stepped over the concrete border into South Korea, where Moon Jae-in waited with an outstretched hand. The two men strolled along a garden path, planted a tree, and signed a declaration for peace on the Korean Peninsula. Within months Kim would also meet Donald Trump in Singapore. The diplomacy went nowhere, but the symbolism was, briefly, electric.
Trump and Kim meet in Singapore
Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands in front of crossed flags on Sentosa Island, becoming the first sitting American president to meet a North Korean leader. They signed a thin joint statement. Subsequent meetings produced no denuclearization, but the optics and the photographs marked a new genre of strongman diplomacy.
Camp Fire incinerates Paradise
A faulty PG&E transmission line sparked a wildfire that crossed the town of Paradise, California, in four hours flat and burned it to the ground, destroying nearly nineteen thousand structures. Eighty-five people died, many trapped in their cars on clogged evacuation routes. The town never really came back. The age of climate-driven megafires had arrived in middle-class America.
Avengers: Infinity War opens
Marvel Studios stitched together a decade and twenty films into a single billion-dollar cinematic event in which half the universe vanished at a villain's snap. Audiences gasped in unison from Tokyo to Tegucigalpa. The franchise model, the cinematic universe, the post-credits scene: a Hollywood paradigm reached its peak watering hole, and the box office receipts proved it.
Thai cave rescue
Twelve boys and their soccer coach, trapped for seventeen days in a flooded cave in northern Thailand, were brought out one by one through pitch-black underwater passages by an international team of cave divers. The world watched the live coverage breathlessly. One Thai diver had died. All twelve children survived.