2022
Russia invades Ukraine
Before dawn Vladimir Putin announced a "special military operation" and Russian missiles struck cities across Ukraine. Columns of tanks rolled toward Kyiv. The capital was supposed to fall in three days. Instead Volodymyr Zelensky filmed himself in the streets, the columns bogged down, and Europe's largest war since 1945 began.
ChatGPT goes public
OpenAI quietly opened a chat interface to its language model and within five days it had a million users. Within two months it had a hundred million, the fastest consumer technology adoption in history. Suddenly anyone could ask a machine to write a poem, a memo, or a lie. The AI age began in conversation.
Pakistan's monsoon catastrophe
Months of unprecedented rain inundated a third of Pakistan, drowning villages from Sindh to Baluchistan and displacing 33 million people in the worst flooding in the nation's history. More than 1,700 died. Climate diplomats called it a preview of loss and damage to come. Pakistan, responsible for less than 1% of global emissions, paid a coastal nation's price.
Mahsa Amini protests
A 22-year-old Iranian Kurd named Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran's morality police after being arrested for an improperly worn headscarf. Within days women across Iran were burning their hijabs in public squares and chanting Woman, Life, Freedom. The regime cracked down with bullets and executions, but the spell of compulsion had broken.
Hunga Tonga eruption
An undersea volcano in the South Pacific erupted with the largest atmospheric explosion since Krakatoa, sending tsunamis across the ocean and a shock wave four times around the planet. Tonga was cut off from the world for days. The plume of water vapor it punched into the stratosphere would warm the climate for years.
Roe v. Wade overturned
The U.S. Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Donald Trump, overruled the half-century-old constitutional right to abortion. A leaked draft had warned the country in May. State trigger laws snapped into effect within hours. American women in roughly half the country woke up the next morning with fewer rights than their mothers.
Bucha massacre revealed
After Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv's northern suburbs, journalists entered the town of Bucha and found bodies in the streets, in basements, with hands tied behind backs and bullet wounds in their skulls. The images of an executed civilian and a child's bicycle next to a corpse circulated for weeks. War crimes investigators were already on planes.