Fifty-Two Weeks That Felt Like History
The last days of any year produce this strange compulsion to summarize—to hold twelve months still long enough to decide what they added up to. 2013 doesn’t sit still for that particularly well.
In April, two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people died on the street; hundreds more were injured. The subsequent manhunt played out live across social media with a velocity that felt genuinely new at the time—Twitter identifying suspects who weren’t suspects, Reddit doing the same, cable news filling airtime with confident speculation about almost nothing. The Tsarnaev brothers were found within days. The grief was enormous and then immediately political, as American grief tends to become.
In June, Edward Snowden flew to Hong Kong and handed a journalist a hard drive. What came off that drive kept coming for months: the NSA had been collecting phone metadata at scale, running surveillance programs that hoovered up communications across the internet with the cooperation—sometimes coerced, sometimes willing—of the major tech companies. Snowden flew to Moscow and has been there since. The debate about whether what he did was heroism or treason never fully resolved, but what settled permanently is the baseline knowledge—you were being watched, at a scale you hadn’t imagined, and the people watching had decided not to tell you.
Meanwhile, country after country added itself to the map of marriage equality. France, New Zealand, Uruguay, Brazil, the UK—each passing its own legislation across the same twelve months. The US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in June. The full picture wasn’t there yet, but the direction was unmistakable.
These things don’t cohere into a single meaning. Years don’t work that way regardless of what year-in-review packages want you to believe. What I remember about 2013 isn’t a theme—it’s the sensation of watching things that actually mattered happen in sequence, the feeling that the news was consequential rather than just loud. Whether that feeling was accurate is something I still turn over.