2019
Wuhan reports a strange pneumonia
On New Year's Eve, the World Health Organization's China office received notice of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan with no known cause. A seafood market was implicated. Within weeks the virus had a name, SARS-CoV-2, and had begun spreading to neighboring countries. A century after the Spanish flu, another respiratory pandemic was underway.
First image of a black hole
The Event Horizon Telescope, a planet-spanning array of eight radio dishes synchronized to the precision of an atom, released the first direct image of a black hole: a fuzzy orange donut of superheated gas 53 million light-years away, in the heart of galaxy M87. Katie Bouman's joyful face went viral. The unseeable had finally posed for its portrait.
Notre-Dame burns
Flames erupted in the attic of Notre-Dame de Paris just after evening Mass, devouring the lead roof and toppling the nineteenth-century spire into the nave in a cascade of molten metal and burning timber. Parisians knelt on the bridges and sang hymns. The medieval stone bones survived. Emmanuel Macron promised reconstruction in five years and was, almost, right.
Australia's Black Summer
Bushfires that had been smoldering since spring exploded across Australia's south-east, killing 33 people directly, displacing thousands, and pushing nearly three billion native animals into ash, smoke, or death in what became the worst fire season in the continent's recorded history. Sydney's air turned hazardous orange. The continent's relationship with fire, and with its government's climate denialism, changed.
Hong Kong rises
Two million people, more than a quarter of the city, marched against a proposed extradition bill that would let suspects be sent to mainland China. The protests grew into a movement for Hong Kong's autonomy itself, met by rubber bullets, water cannons, and, eventually, a national security law that ended them.
K-pop conquers America
BTS, a seven-member Korean boy band that had begun in a small Seoul agency, sold out stadiums across the United States and topped the Billboard charts in English and Korean alike. Their fan army, called ARMY, organized global activism and bought their songs to the top of every algorithm. Cultural gravity had moved east.
Greta at the UN
A sixteen-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg, who had crossed the Atlantic by sailboat, told a roomful of world leaders, "How dare you." Her voice cracked. The clip looped for weeks. Climate striking schoolchildren had a face, and the adults charged with the future had a public scolding they could not unhear.