Events & Eras

Periods and episodes that defined a generation, fully contextualised.

Entries in this category (53)

• Chernobyl Exclusion Zone — The 2,600 km² no-go zone created in 36 hours
• The Dot-Com Bubble — When any company with '.com' in its name was worth a fortune
• Nusantara — The $32B capital being carved out of a rainforest
• Forest City — The $100B Malaysian mega-city that became a ghost town
• Ferdinand Marcos — The dictator who ruled the Philippines for 21 years and was swept out by a street uprising
• Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. — The opposition senator whose assassination ignited a revolution
• 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami — The deadliest tsunami in recorded history
• 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake & Tsunami — The magnitude 9 quake and tsunami that killed ~19,700 and crippled Fukushima
• Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) — The strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded — and a humanitarian catastrophe in the Philippines
• Tangshan Earthquake (1976) — The devastating 1976 quake that levelled a Chinese industrial city of a million
• 1970 Bhola Cyclone — The deadliest cyclone in recorded history — and a disaster that helped create a nation
• Imelda Marcos — The First Lady of the Marcos dictatorship — a symbol of its excess, and an enduring political survivor
• Jovito Salonga — The senator who fought the Marcos dictatorship — and made the Philippines' opposition respectable
• Hacienda Luisita — The sugar estate at the centre of the Aquino family's land-reform battle
• Hukbalahap & the NPA — The two great Philippine insurgencies — from anti-Japanese guerrillas to Maoist revolutionaries
• Acorn Computers — The Cambridge firm that won the BBC's schools contract, built a processor nobody asked for, and died — while that processor ended up in most of the world's phones
• AdultFriendFinder — The adult dating site at the centre of a 412 million-account breach reported in 2016 — run by a group that went through Chapter 11, sold Penthouse, and is still trading today
• Anwar Ibrahim — Malaysia's most famous political prisoner — who went from a jail cell to prime minister
• Ashley Madison — The adultery website whose 2015 hack exposed 36 million users — and whose owner then paid $1.66 million for faking profiles and selling a "Full Delete" that did not always delete
• Honda ASIMO — Honda's celebrated humanoid robot that astonished the world — retired after a landmark run
• Bose v. JBL — Bose sued JBL and Infinity over a loudspeaker port shaped like an ellipse — and won $5,676,718.32 in a case that turned on one conic section
• Central Sulawesi Disaster (2018) — The earthquake, tsunami and liquefaction that devastated Palu — a triple disaster
• Citizen Watch — The Japanese watchmaker that beat the Swiss on accuracy, then bought its way into the Swiss industry it had helped nearly destroy
• Craigslist Personals — Craigslist's dating and casual-encounter categories, taken offline on 22 March 2018 — not by a hack or a court order, but by FOSTA/SESTA, the US law that carved sex-trafficking claims out of Section 230
• Credit Suisse — The 160-year-old Swiss banking giant that collapsed after a crisis of confidence — and was absorbed by UBS
• Cyclone Nargis (2008) — Myanmar's deadliest natural disaster — a cyclone that killed at least 140,000 and shook the world
• D.B. Cooper — The hijacker who parachuted into history with $200,000 — and vanished — the only unsolved airline hijacking in US history
• El Dorado — The mythical 'city of gold' that drove centuries of doomed expeditions — and was never a city at all
• Enigma — The cipher machine Germany trusted with its military secrets — reconstructed by Polish mathematicians, then broken at Bletchley Park
• Flores Earthquake & Tsunami (1992) — The magnitude-7.8 quake and tsunami that killed about 2,500 on the island of Flores
• Genghis Khan's Tomb — The burial site of the Mongol conqueror that has never been found — deliberately concealed for 800 years
• Harman v. VOXX — A Samsung subsidiary asserted thirteen design patents over the look of an illuminated party speaker against a single Klipsch product — then the case was stayed, dismissed with prejudice, and never tried
• Huawei — The Chinese telecom giant that built much of the world's 5G — then became the centre of a global political storm
• Hun Sen — The longest-serving leader in Cambodia's modern history — who handed the premiership to his son but stayed in power
• Jaguar — The iconic British luxury car maker that has paused production and relaunched as an all-electric brand
• Jamie Dimon — The bank executive who got thrown out of the family business — and came back to save Wall Street
• Jimmy Hoffa — The powerful Teamsters union boss who vanished from a Detroit parking lot in 1975 — never found
• Lee Kuan Yew — The founding father who turned Singapore into a first-world city — and left behind a legacy still being fought over
• The Lost City of Z — The ancient civilization Percy Fawcett vanished searching for in the Amazon — never found, but an enduring mystery
• 1863 Manila Earthquake — The magnitude-7.4 quake that destroyed much of Spanish colonial Manila in 1863
• Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 — The vanished Boeing 777 that disappeared with 239 people — aviation's greatest unsolved mystery
• Moro Gulf Earthquake & Tsunami (1976) — The midnight earthquake and tsunami that killed about 8,000 across Mindanao's coast — the Philippines' deadliest quake
• Mount Pinatubo Eruption (1991) — One of the largest volcanic eruptions of the 20th century — a blast heard across Southeast Asia
• The Colonizers of the Philippines — Spain, the US and Japan each held the archipelago — and their legacies still shape how the world relates to it today
• The Quartz War — The fifty-year fight over how a watch keeps time — which Japan won on accuracy, Switzerland won on price and prestige, and which is now being fought again from China
• The Romanov Remains — The mystery of Russia's last royal family — executed in 1918, their bones hidden for decades, then found and identified by DNA
• Rubik's Cube — The Hungarian teaching aid that became a 1980s fad, died, and came back as a sport — built today by companies that could only exist because the patent ran out
• Sea-Gull — The Tianjin watch factory that bought a Swiss movement maker's tooling, kept a dead Swiss design alive as the ST19, and co-built the watch that won a prize in Geneva
• Sinclair Research — The Cambridge company that sold Britain its first computer under £100, then lost the business to Amstrad — while the machines it put in bedrooms ended up as Microsoft, EA and Rockstar
• Swatch — The cheap plastic watch that was invented to save Swiss watchmaking — and became the umbrella for the group that now owns Omega, Longines, Tissot and Breguet
• Tropical Storm Thelma (Uring, 1991) — The 'bagyo' that sent a wall of water through Ormoc City — one of the Philippines' deadliest storms
• WABOT-1 — The world's first full-scale humanoid robot — built in Japan in 1973, the grandparent of today's robots
• Zenith (watchmaker) — The Swiss watch house whose best movement was saved from destruction by an engineer who disobeyed a direct order and hid the tooling in an attic