All 81 References in Fall Out Boy’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Explained

The titular superhero of television series Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–96) helped a group of cartoon teenagers in their battle against ecological catastrophe. Captain Planet taught these teens—and the show’s viewers—about the importance of environmental conservation.

In the early 2010s, a wave of pro-democracy protests and uprisings erupted throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Known as the Arab Spring, this series of revolts targeted authoritarian regimes and their leaders. Protesters found rapid success during Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution and Egypt’s January 25 Revolution. Bloody struggles between ruling regimes and opposition groups subsequently arose in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria.

In April 1992 four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted on all but one charge connected with the severe beating of Rodney King, an African American motorist. The charges included assault with a deadly weapon. The officers, three of whom were white, were acquitted by a mostly white jury despite a widely circulated video capturing the brutal attack. Following the announcement of the acquittal, protesters took to the streets all over Los Angeles. More than 50 people were killed, more than 2,300 were injured, and thousands were arrested. With $1 billion in property damage, the L.A. Riots became one of the most destructive civil disruptions in American history.

See above.

Along with the rise of artificial intelligence in the 21st century came deepfakes: images, videos, and audio samples of fake events created by advanced computers. Deepfake technology can imitate a person’s voice, likeness, and mannerisms in order to make it appear as if that person said outlandish remarks or engaged in inappropriate activities. Deepfake videos began popping up about 2017, the vast majority of which were pornographic. Reactions toward the new technology included worries of defamation, particularly with regard to altered videos of politicians, and concern that pornographic deepfakes can be created without the featured individuals’ consent.

Several deadly earthquakes occurred since the Billy Joel released “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in 1989. These include a magnitude-9.1 quake in the Indian Ocean in 2004, which triggered a tsunami; a magnitude-7.0 quake in Haiti in 2010; and a magnitude-9.0 quake that triggered a tsunami in Japan in 2011 and caused a major nuclear accident (see number 17 on this list). Altogether, these earthquakes claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

In March 2010 the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted for the first time since the 19th century. The eruptions melted glacial ice at the center of the volcano, sending steam and ash into the atmosphere. Prevailing winds carried the ash cloud southeast to northern Europe, prompting many European countries to temporarily ground flights and shut down their national airspace.

On April 19, 1995, former U.S. Army soldier Timothy McVeigh ignited a homemade bomb, which he concealed in a rental truck, in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The terrorist attack killed 168 people and injured several hundred more. Until the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Kurt Cobain was the lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter for the band Nirvana. He was an unofficial spokesman for teen angst, bringing alternative rock into the mainstream. Cobain was a frequent user of heroin and battled depression. In 1994 he died by suicide at age 27.

In the 1990s Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri first created the concept for Pocket Monsters, now known as Pokémon. In 1996 Nintendo released the first Pokémon video games, Pokémon Green and Pokémon Red. Pokémon soon became a cultural phenomenon, with the creatures appearing in more video games, trading cards, several television series, and a movie franchise. In 2016 the mobile game Pokémon Go was released, reviving the monsters’ popularity.

Tiger Woods was the golfer to beat throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, following one of the most impressive amateur careers in golf history with a prestigious run in the professional circuit. Despite media scrutiny surrounding his personal life, he is considered one of the greatest professional golfers in history, having tied the record for the most PGA Tour wins with 82.

Created by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in 2003, Myspace was one of the first social network sites. The platform peaked in popularity between 2005 and 2008, with tens of millions of users. After the introduction of Facebook, however, Myspace’s popularity rapidly declined.

Monsanto was a dominant company in American agriculture, perhaps best known for its controversial use of genetically modified organism (GMO) technology to produce crops. In the late 20th century Monsanto genetically engineered seeds to resist the herbicide glyphosate, which resulted in crops being sprayed with more herbicides to kill weeds without harming the crops. The technology sparked an ongoing debate regarding safety issues associated with GMOs and the wider use of biotechnology in agriculture.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, a seven-book narrative following the titular wizard boy and his battle against the evil Voldemort, captivated audiences in the late 1990s and 2000s. The series was adapted into a blockbuster eight-film franchise starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint; in 2010, Universal Studios opened a Harry Potter-themed section in their Florida amusement park. Since then, J.K. Rowling has faced criticism for insensitive comments about the transgender community.

Stephenie Meyer’s vampire-themed Twilight Saga, the first book of which was published in 2005, entertained fans with love triangles, forbidden romance, and rivalry between vampires and werewolves. Plus, the Twilight books and corresponding film series sparked a major debate among fans: Team Edward or Team Jacob?

On June 25, 2009, “King of Pop” Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest in Los Angeles, California, at age 50. His death was caused by a lethal mix of sedatives and propofol, an anesthetic. Jackson’s death was later ruled a homicide, and in 2011 Conrad Murray, Jackson’s personal doctor, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

In 2011 a magnitude-9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a tsunami whose waves flooded and damaged the backup generators at the Fukushima Daiichi (“Number One”) nuclear power plant in northern Japan. Three reactors partially melted, releasing radioactive material into the surrounding area. Over 100,000 people were forced to evacuate their homes, and over 2,000 lives were lost due to the disaster.

In February 2014 Russia, led by President Vladimir Putin, invaded and illegally annexed Crimea, an autonomous republic of Ukraine on the Black Sea. Putin characterized his actions as an effort to support the Russian ethnic majority and military assets in the region. Russia’s invasion followed the ousting of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose pro-Russia policy resulted in protests in Kyiv and the toppling of his government. In March 2014 the United Nations General Assembly condemned the annexation. The conflict in Crimea was a prelude to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent war between the two countries, during which the Russian military continued to occupy the peninsula.

In 2018 Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics and political consulting firm, was at the forefront of a national debate in the U.S. about Internet data privacy and user consent. The company was under investigation for harvesting data from some 87 million Facebook users without their consent. It used this data to create detailed profiles of American voters, designed to be sold to political campaigns. Cambridge Analytica had ties to the campaigns of several Republican politicians in the United States, including Senator Ted Cruz and President Donald Trump. Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, also received criticism for mishandling user data.

In 2011 Kim Jong-Un succeeded his father, Kim Jong Il, as the supreme leader of North Korea. While many details about Kim Jong-Un and his regime remain unknown outside North Korea, he is often characterized as a repressive dictator who directed the rapid development of North Korean nuclear weapons. He engaged in several wars of words with U.S. President Donald Trump, until the two leaders met face-to-face in 2018 and pledged to de-escalate growing nuclear tension between the two nations.

Robert Downey, Jr., is an American actor known for his portrayal of Tony Stark and his superhero alter ego Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a series of blockbuster films including Iron Man and The Avengers. By 2020 the franchise’s cumulative global box office receipts had topped $22 billion.

The Afghanistan War, an international conflict triggered by the September 11 attacks, was waged between the United States and Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014. In 2021, after the execution of U.S. President Joe Biden’s order to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban regained full control of the country for the first time since the late 1990s.

In 2016 the American baseball team the Chicago Cubs won the World Series for this first time since 1908.

Barack Obama was the first African American to be elected president of the United States, serving in the office from 2009 to 2017. In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Steven Spielberg is an American film director, producer, and three-time Academy Award winner. His filmography includes Jaws (1975), The Color Purple (1985), and Jurassic Park (1993), among others.

An explosion on August 4, 2020, devastated the streets of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. When a warehouse caught fire, a large amount of stored ammonium nitrate combusted, resulting in a mushroom cloud explosion that killed more than 200 people and injured about 7,000. The chemical reaction came at the fault of improper safety measures and neglect. Following the disaster, almost half a million people were left homeless.

“Unabomber” is a name given to Ted Kaczynski, an American mathematician, political extremist, and domestic terrorist. Between 1978 and 1995 he detonated 16 bombs in the United States, attacking universities and airlines. By the time of his arrest, 3 people had been killed and 23 injured. Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison with no parole, where he died reportedly by suicide on June 10, 2023.

In 1993 Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband’s penis. John Bobbit, a former U.S. Marine, then underwent a nine-hour surgery to have his penis successfully reattached. The incident was widely covered in national media, and “Bobbitt” became a household name. Charged with assault, Lorena accused her husband of physical and sexual abuse, charges he later faced in court. The couple officially divorced in 1995.

The Boston Marathon bombing was a terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. Placed and detonated in the crowd, homemade bombs injured more than 260 people and caused 3 deaths. The perpetrators, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, avoided capture for a few days after the bombing. On April 19 Tamerlan died after a shootout with police, and Dzhokhar was later apprehended, convicted of terrorism associated with Islamic radicalization, among other counts, and sentenced to death.

In 2009 Richard and Mayumi Heene reported their six-year-old son, Falcon, to be trapped inside a released homemade helium balloon. Shaped like a flying saucer, the balloon was in the air for a total of 90 minutes. Having not found the boy northeast of Denver, where the balloon landed, rescuers began the search for his body. But Falcon was later discovered to be hiding in the attic of the Heenes’ home, having never been in the balloon at all. The situation received incredibly vast global publicity, with Falcon nicknamed “Balloon Boy.”

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States launched a global counterterrorism effort. The term war on terror was first officially used by the U.S. government on September 20. The effort came to include major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the monitoring of political ideologies in the Middle East, the capture and interrogation of suspected terrorists, and other international operations.

QAnon is an American conservative conspiracy theory that originated online in October 2017 and gained traction among supporters of then U.S. president Donald Trump. Believers tend to antagonize the Democratic Party, Hollywood, and what they consider the “deep state” within the U.S. government, members of which groups they consider to be satanic and cannibalistic sexual predators. The group’s anonymous leader, Q, was determined by linguists to most likely be the creation of South African software engineer Paul Furber and 8chan/8kun administrator Ron Watkins.

In the history of the United States, only three presidents have ever been impeached:Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868 for having violated the Tenure of Office Act; Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice after denying an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky; and Donald Trump, who is the first to have been impeached twice. In 2019 he was presented with the articles of impeachment in connection with his alleged attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for political favors in exchange for military support. Two years later Trump was impeached again, regarding his role in the January 6 storming of the United States Capitol.

The melting of Arctic ice due to climate change threatens Arctic species, including polar bears, with displacement and habitat loss.

Fyre Festival was a 2017 music festival characterized by fraudulent marketing and disastrous mismanagement. Founded by con artist Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, it was marketed by celebrities and social media influencers as a luxury music festival experience on an island in The Bahamas. The eventual accommodations, infrastructure, and schedule lacked the originally promised grandeur. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lawsuits followed in the ensuing years. McFarland pleaded guilty to fraud charges and in 2022 was released after serving four years of his original six-year sentence.

The Black Parade is the title of the third studio album of the American emo punk-rock band My Chemical Romance, released in 2006. The album follows a dying man through death and beyond. In 2021 Beyoncé earned the Grammy for best R&B performance for her single “Black Parade,” from her visual album Black Is King.

Michael Phelps is a former American Olympic swimmer. He won the most medals of any athlete in Olympic history, with 23 gold, 3 silver, and 2 bronze medals in his collection.

Y2K is a term originally coined to address a computer-related concern that emerged as the 20th century was coming to a close, sometimes called the “Millennium Bug.” In the 20th century many computer systems and software abbreviated four-digit years as two digits. Concerns were raised that software would fail to distinguish between years like 1900 and 2000 upon the turn of the century, though the actual impact was minor. Later the term came to signify the pop culture trends and aesthetic of the early aughts.

Boris Johnson is a British politician who served as mayor of London from 2008 to 2016 and was elected Conservative Party leader and prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2019. He was involved in facilitating Brexit (see below). In 2022 information was made public that Johnson routinely violated public health regulations in association with the COVID-19 pandemic. Johnson denied the allegations in Parliament but was forced to resign in September 2022.

In a referendum held on June 23, 2016, some 52 percent of participating voters opted for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (EU). Brexit was the political process of the U.K.’s withdrawal. The term is a combination of the words British and exit. In the few years of active debate regarding how the exit would take place, Brexit was destabilized by a change of leadership, with Theresa May being replaced by Boris Johnson. Nevertheless, the decision was finalized, and Brexit came into action as of 23:00 GMT on January 31, 2020.

Kanye West is an American rapper and fashion designer known for his critically acclaimed albums such as The College Dropout (2004) and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)—and for his many public controversies, including anti-Semitic comments and support for U.S. President Donald Trump. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, he leaped onstage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance of the award for best female video. He took over the microphone to publicly exclaim: “I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!” In 2016 at a fashion show for his brand YEEZY, he released his single “Famous,” reigniting the conflict by referring to Swift by a derogatory term.

Taylor Swift is an American singer-songwriter whose discography—which includes Taylor Swift (2006), Fearless (2008), and 1989 (2014)—traces her transition from acoustic country music to the world of pop. Many of her songs reference her personal life, including the conflict with Kanye West at the 2009 Video Music Awards (see above).

Netflix’s 2016 release Stranger Things is a throwback to the 1980s in the form of a TV horror series. Over several seasons the show follows young friends investigating child abduction, government experiments, and supernatural monsters in small-town Indiana and beyond.

A popular documentary series on Netflix, Tiger King follows Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known as “Joe Exotic,” and big-cat breeding in the United States. In 2019 Joe Exotic was convicted of animal abuse and the attempted murder for hire of fellow zookeeper and animal rights activist Carole Baskin.

The world’s supply chain, already under extreme stress because of the COVID-19 pandemic, all but collapsed when the Ever Given, one of the world’s largest container ships, beached diagonally in the Suez Canal. As a result of high winds, poor visibility, and speeding, the Ever Given lost control in a single-lane passage, blocking the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021. An essential waterway, the Suez Canal receives about 15 percent of the world’s shipping traffic and is the shortest route between Europe and Asia.

On December 14, 2012, 20 students and 6 educators were killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, by 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who entered the school with an AR-15 and two semiautomatic pistols. Sandy Hook would rank among the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, and its enduring legacy would be marked by continued failure from federal and local entities in producing gun reform legislation.

The Columbine High School shootings took place on April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado. Columbine was the U.S.’s deadliest school shooting at the time it occurred. Two students—armed with semiautomatic rifles, pistols, and several explosives—entered the high school and killed 12 students and an educator before killing themselves.

On July 13, 2015, Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African American woman, was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller county, Texas. Her death was ruled a suicide. Bland had been arrested three days earlier on the charge of assaulting a public servant. It resulted from an argument between Bland and a state trooper who issued her a citation for failing to signal a lane change. Bland’s death inspired the enactment of Texas’s 2017 Sandra Bland Act, which aims to prevent future similar tragedies, and the HBO documentary Say Her Name, released in 2018.

On November 22, 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by law enforcement in a Cleveland park. The officer was heavily criticized for shooting the child within seconds of arrival on the scene, as were police dispatchers who did not relay to officers that the gun was likely a toy and the individual likely a child. Rice had been playing on the playground with an air pellet gun.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), one of the deadliest global terrorist organizations with Salafi jihadist ideology, originated with al-Qaeda in Iraq during the Iraq War. It branched away in 2006 to form what would eventually become known as ISIS. The radical insurgent group was at its largest and most bureaucratically sophisticated in 2015, holding a geographic area covering some 40,000 square miles, before declining and being largely dismantled by the end of the decade. ISIS is characterized by extreme Islamic fundamentalism and extreme violence.

LeBron James is widely considered one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He has played on teams that won the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship four times (2012, 2013, 2016, and 2020) and has been the league’s all-time leading scorer since 2023, when he broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s 38-year-old record of 38,387 career points.

In a rare episode of gun violence in Japan, former prime minister Shinzo Abe was fatally shot during a campaign rally on July 8, 2022, by a 41-year-old man with a homemade gun at close range. The assailant was disillusioned with Abe’s alleged long-standing ties to the Unification Church, to which the assailant’s mother had donated $700,000 and subsequently bankrupted the family. Abe was the longest-serving prime minister of modern Japan, affiliated with the Liberal-Democratic Party of Japan, and was known for his diplomatic skills and the economic agenda that came to be known as “Abenomics.” 

Meghan Markle is an American former actress and the spouse of Prince Harry of the United Kingdom. Perhaps her best-known acting role was in the popular legal drama series Suits (2011–19). She married Prince Harry in 2018, but in 2020, amid allegations of poor and possibly racist treatment of Markle by the royal family, the couple retreated from royal duties and moved to Los Angeles. In 2022 Netflix released Harry & Meghan, a candid documentary series on the couple’s relationship and their move to become nonworking members of the royal family.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes after Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill. The viral video circulation of Floyd’s last minutes generated global attention and mass protests regarding police brutality, empowering the Black Lives Matter movement. That summer anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people in the U.S. demonstrated over Floyd’s death, in addition to those at similar protests held in at least 40 countries. In 2021 Chauvin was convicted of murder, a rarity for law enforcement officers standing trial for police violence.

Located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest building, with a height of 2,717 feet (828 meters) and 163 floors. It was unveiled on January 4, 2010, following six years of construction, and far surpassed Taipei 101, the previous record holder. It was designed by the Chicago-based architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Released in 1986 by Nintendo, the intergalactic videogame Metroid allows players to control bounty hunter Samus Aran as she adventures on desolate planets or space stations. Constituting a franchise of more than a dozen titles, Metroid games have sold more than 20 million copies globally. Nintendo released Metroid Dread in 2021.

In short, where are the aliens? In his later years Nobel Prize-winning physicist and “architect of the nuclear age” Enrico Fermi conjectured this paradox, wondering how the age and size of the universe had not yet yielded an extraterrestrial civilization that could have made some contact with Earth. Or have they already…? 

The Williams sisters are a remarkable duo who commanded women’s tennis for about two decades. Serena, known for her powerful style of play, has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most of any player during the open era. Venus, the elder of the two, has won 7 Grand Slam singles titles and is highly regarded for her athleticism and grace on the court. As a team, they have won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles.

Considered one of the all-time greatest basketball players, Michael Jordan is known for his incredible acrobatic and leaping abilities, tenacious shooting, and defense. The number that appeared on his jersey for most of his professional career, 23, is an homage to his brother, Larry Jordan, who wore the number 45. When both brothers played on the same court in high school, the number Michael Jordan would wear was half of his brother’s jersey number: 23, rounded up from 22.5.

MTV, or Music Television, played music videos around the clock on cable television beginning in 1981. Showcasing hit artists such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Tina Turner, and Peter Gabriel, MTV became the go-to platform and destination for music lovers. In the 2000s the emergence of Youtube, which made it possible for most music videos to be watched anywhere at anytime, confirmed the obsoleteness of MTV’s former programming focus on music videos—a focus MTV has continually shifted away from since its inception. The line may also reference to the Buggles’ song “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first music video to air on MTV in 1981.

The Nickelodeon children’s cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants first aired in 1999. Set under the sea, the absurdist cartoon features the eponymous sea sponge and his aquatic friends.

For nearly four decades, government agencies were unable to locate the Golden State Killer, who committed 13 murders and kidnappings, nearly 50 rapes, and more than 120 home invasions between 1975 and 1986 in California. James DeAngelo was identified as the killer in 2018 with the help of novel genetic testing using nearly 40-year-old DNA, a technique that has been implemented nationwide to solve scores of murders and rapes. In 2020 DeAngelo pleaded guilty in court and was sentenced to 11 consecutive life terms without parole.

Michael Jordan briefly switched from his iconic number 23 jersey to a number 45 jersey in March 1995, after a two-year break from the NBA during which he played minor league baseball. Jordan wrote that he didn’t want to return to the court wearing the last number seen by his father, who had been murdered in 1993. Jordan reverted back to the number 23 after, fittingly, 23 games.

During a scorching hot weekend in late July 1999, the notorious final Woodstock music festival took place at a decommissioned air force base near Rome, New York. Headliners included Korn, Bush, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Kid Rock, and Rage Against the Machine. These acts attracted a more aggressive crowd than previous iterations of the festival, which was first billed as “3 Days of Peace and Music” in 1969. Woodstock ’99 was a cornucopia of chaos that included temperatures above 100 °F with little shade, overcrowding, overflowing septic systems, rampant sexual assaults, and destructive riots and fires that razed the grounds.

The Batman movie franchise was rebooted in the 1989 film Batman, starring actor Michael Keaton as the hero alongside Jack Nicholson as the homicidal trickster Joker. Directed by Tim Burton, the movie won an Oscar and raked in $411 million at the box office. Keaton reprised his role in the 1992 sequel Batman Returns and in 2023 in The Flash.

Night fell on election day in November 2000 and a clear presidential winner had yet to surface. In fact, Americans would wait for more than a month, until December 12, and for a ruling from the Supreme Court to know if their next president would be Republican George W. Bush or Democrat Vice President Al Gore. After legal challenges and protracted ballot recounts involving Florida’s vote, the Court ruled 5–4 that there should be no further recounts and the election should be certified. That gave Bush Florida’s electoral college votes and the election despite the fact that Gore won the popular vote.

Elon Musk is an American billionaire and entrepreneur who has cofounded several companies, including PayPal and SpaceX. He also funded Tesla and later became CEO. In 2022 SpaceX launched the first spaceflight completely manned by civilians, and Tesla became the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world. Musk made headlines in October 2022 when he bought a majority stake of Twitter, making drastic changes after naming himself CEO of the social media company—though he stepped down from the position less than a year later. He is the richest person in the world as of 2023.

Colin Kaepernick is an American football player and social activist who was a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. He is best known for kneeling during the national anthem at the beginning of his NFL games, protesting racial injustice and police brutality in the United States. Many NFL players followed his lead, creating much controversy. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football,” Kaepernick commented at the time. He last played professional football in 2017.

In February 2021 a bitter winter storm swept through Texas, ushering in temperatures cold enough to freeze natural gas supply lines and prevent wind turbines from spinning. What resulted was a widespread power outage that affected about 10 million Texans during the coldest time of the year. Texas’s deregulated and independent energy infrastructure left it isolated from the country’s power supply, compounding the issues. State officials reported that 246 Texans died from complications of the weather and power failure.

Jeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur, a billionaire, and the founder of Amazon.com. What started as a small virtual bookstore in 1995 has diversified into many sectors including cloud computing, entertainment, electronics, and online retail. Amazon’s yearly revenue increased from some $600 million in 1998 to almost $233 billion two decades later, in 2018. Bezos also founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000 and bought The Washington Post in 2013. According to Forbes, Bezos ranked as the richest person in the world from 2018 to 2021.

Climate change describes the fluctuations in Earth’s weather as a result of atmospheric changes, biological interactions, geological processes, and astronomical events. In recent decades climate change has entered public discourse in regard to global warming—the phenomenon of increasing average air temperatures near Earth’s surface. Climate change and global warming have occurred since Earth’s beginning, but a variety of anthropogenic factors are increasingly affecting the pace and severity of climate change. Notably, human industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels produce greenhouse gasses that trap heat in the planet’s atmosphere. In 2023 daily surface air temperatures reached record highs while Antarctic sea ice levels fell to record lows.

Northern white rhinos are thought to be extinct in the wild, and only two females remain in captivity. The last male of the subspecies died on March 19, 2018, due to complications of old age. Rampant poaching for their prized horns led to the rhinos’ dire situation. Najin and Fatu, the mother-daughter survivors, are kept under armed guard in Kenya to protect them. As of 2020, there were about 10,000 wild southern white rhinos. Despite its population success, the subspecies is classified as near threatened because of continued high levels of poaching.

Sailing from Hawaii to California, Charles Moore discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997. Four currents form a vortex between the coasts of Japan and California, swirling debris toward two patches near each respective coast. The eastern patch, off the coast of California, is 620,000 square miles of detritus—nearly three times the size of France. In 2018 the nonprofit environmental engineering organization the Ocean Cleanup performed an expansive study on the patch, revealing that it’s composed of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of trash weighing about 87,000 tons. The patch includes an immense amount of microplastics that lend the water a milky quality.

Tom DeLonge is an American musician and a founding member of several pop-punk bands, often serving as lead vocalist and guitarist. He has an on-again, off-again relationship with his most successful band, blink-182, playing with two other groups during breaks: Box Car Racer and Angels & Airwaves. He is known for his eccentric stage performances, even performing nude. He cofounded the multimedia company To The Stars in 2014 and became invested in research on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, also known as UFOs), enlisting the help of established experts and government insiders.

NASA developed two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to analyze Mars’s geology and uncover possible traces of water. Both landed successfully on Mars in January 2004, and, although each was designed for a 90-day mission, the rovers were operational for years. Spirit ceased transmitting to Earth in 2010, followed by Opportunity in 2018. The missions were a success, and NASA concluded that water did historically exist on Mars in sufficient quantities to sustain microbial life.

Avatar is a 2009 science-fiction film directed by James Cameron. It won three Academy Awards and became the highest-grossing film of all time, earning $2.9 billion. A sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, was released in 2022 and also won an Academy Award.

The last decade has seen quick advancement in autonomous vehicle technology. Notably, Tesla released its Autopilot feature in 2014, which gave Model S vehicles (and later other models) the capability to autonomously steer, adjust speed, and brake. Other electric vehicles, including the 2022 BMW iX and the Ford Mustang Mach-E, support similar features. Waymo, established in 2016 by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is an autonomous ride-hailing service that operates in select cities in the United States. Some of its hybrid vehicles are fully driverless, with no human supervisor. The technological advances of self-driving vehicles, however, can be accompanied by safety concerns. For example, Tesla’s Autopilot feature was reported to have been involved in more than 700 crashes from 2019 to 2021.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a class of medications typically used as antidepressants. They are often a first-choice drug because of their reliability and minimal side effects. By raising serotonin levels in the brain, SSRIs have been proven to effectively treat a variety of mental disorders.

Queen Elizabeth II, the United Kingdom’s longest-reigning monarch, died on September 8, 2022. She was 96 years old and had reigned for 70 years. Her son succeeded her, becoming King Charles III. Prince could refer to her husband, Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh, who died on April 9, 2021. The lyric could also be interpreted as a reference to Prince the musical artist, who died on April 21, 2016.

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda militants hijacked four commercial airplanes to be used in suicide attacks against the United States. The first plane impacted the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:46 AM, and a second plane crashed into the south tower 17 minutes later. The south tower collapsed from the damage at 9:59 AM, and the north tower fell shortly after. Fires at the site burned for three months. The attacks in New York resulted in 2,753 dead, including 343 firefighters. The third plane struck the Pentagon, outside Washington, D.C., at 9:37 AM. The final jet, perhaps destined to hit the White House or the Capitol crashed in a field in Pennsylvania at 10:03 AM, after passengers stormed the cockpit to try to seize control away from the hijackers. The September 11 attacks focused American foreign policy on combating terrorism.

See above.