Time magazine ran a cover story titled 'The End of the World as We Know it?' in January 1999

Relive the millennial panic with 'Surviving Y2K'

This multi-episode series follows host Dan Taberski as he interviews coders, survivalists, conspiracy believers, and others who lived the Y2K scare firsthand—while weaving in his own personal story from 1999, providing a more intimate view of the crisis.

The world spent up to $600B to avert the Y2K computer glitch

Early computer programmers used a two-digit code to record years rather than four. With the switch in the year 2000 from '99 to '00, analysts feared databases might fail and prompt outages and financial catastrophe. To prepare, governments and businesses spent an estimated $300B to $600B to mitigate the glitch.

The 2012 Maya-predicted apocalypse didn't really stem from the ancient Mayans

On Dec. 20, 2012, fears of a Mayan-predicted apocalypse gripped Earth, causing panic in some parts of the world, including the stockpiling of vodka in Russia. In this podcast, Maya expert David Stuart—who helped translate some of the relevant Mayan texts—debunks the notion, arguing the Mayan calendar's end marked a cycle, not doomsday.

See how faces on magazine covers have changed over time

This piece examined an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, focusing on 327,322 faces from the archive. Read what the researchers learned.

Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of 'War of the Worlds' invoked real panic

The raconteur's teleplay of HG Wells' 1898 science fiction novel presented the plot as a news broadcast, leading some listeners to believe that New Jersey was being invaded by Martians. This retrospective from the National Endowment for the Humanities unpacks how he made it happen, and the media fallout that ensued.

Take a multimedia journey through the thirteen days that nearly ended the world

In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. This interactive archive from the JFK Library reconstructs those tense days through documents, photos, and secretly recorded conversations from the Kennedy White House.

Read the WEF’s Global Risks Report for 2025

The Global Risks Report is the World Economic Forum’s annual assessment of the most pressing threats facing the world. The 2025 edition highlights declining global optimism, deepening geopolitical and economic tensions, and rising social fragmentation across societies.

The Year 2038 problem is the next potential computer time rollover bug

Many older systems store time as a signed 32-bit integer counting seconds since Jan. 1, 1970. That counter maxes out on Jan. 19, 2038—overflowing into negative time and sending clocks back to 1901, potentially crashing any older software that depends on accurate dates.

Dystopian satire became more prominent in the 20th century

Although "anti-utopian" stories have always existed, the international conflicts of World War I and World War II inspired some of dystopian literature’s most influential novels, like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s "We," Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World," and George Orwell’s "1984." In the decades to follow, more writers would follow the example of those early novels, using the dystopian model to critique artificial intelligence, climate change, and more.

The world, one year after humanity goes extinct

The Earth is so shaped by human action, it's hard to imagine what it would look like without us. This brief, digestible explainer for kids highlights what a humanless world would look like one year after the extinction event.

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

Wikipedia allows users to vote for what the last article on the site will be

Labeled as "humorous" on the site, the "Last topic pool" page lists various conditions where Wikipedia's final article would be written, including various end-of-the-world scenarios, instances where humanity might cease to exist, cases of Wikipedia becoming corrupted or uneditable, and the possibility of all possible knowledge having been written about.

Bezos has frequently cited a 1999 article titled Amazon.bomb to illustrate how dire the early predictions about Amazon got

Over the years, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos often recalls how wrong the predictions in the 1999 Barron’s cover story were. Among other things, that article declared Amazon’s entire business model to be unsustainable and destined to fail, noting its lack of profit and dependence on a massive amount of capital to fund its growth.

How Kurt Cobain's suicide changed the media

Public health experts feared that the suicide of a high-profile figure, especially for young people, would lead to a rise in suicides across the country. The opposite turned out to be true: Suicide rates decreased. Specialists suggest that's due to the way Cobain's death was covered, with news organizations largely avoiding glorification and including crisis hotline information.

The Times Square New Year's celebration originated as a party for The New York Times

The paper moved to the area, originally called Longacre Square, in 1904 and lobbied the city to rename it after the publication. The paper’s publisher, Alfred Ochs, threw a massive all-day party on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the opening of the paper’s headquarters, establishing the location as a destination for the holiday.

In 1914, the Financial Times asked readers to redraw Europe for cash prizes

Two months in World War I, the newspaper invited readers to sketch postwar borders and submit peace terms for cash prizes. The contest captured public attempts to predict a new world order and foreshadowed modern crowdsourced forecasting. It's a wild look at how uncertain Europe's future was at the time.

In 1996, King had 6 books on the New York Times bestseller list

Stephen King has been wildly popular for decades, but he was never more visible than in the 1990s—especially for one week in 1996. All six volumes of the serialized novel "The Green Mile" appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Reading the article not only provides some context for King's ubiquity, but also hints at what would become a norm in publishing: a few big-name authors dominating the charts with their popular series. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

An interview with James Yorke, the man who coined the mathematical term 'chaos'

Along with co-author Tien-Yien Li, the former University of Maryland mathematics department chair published the paper, "Period Three Implies Chaos" in 1975. "Chaos" then became the terminological placeholder for systems with sensitive dependence on initial conditions, which had been well known to mathematicians for over a decade.

A writer's reflection on 'The Falling Man' - the man who fell from the World Trade Center

In an excerpt from his ‘Press Box’ interview with Bryan Curtis, writer Tom Junod discusses his Esquire story about the image of a man who fell or jumped from the North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

See the celebration at the Berlin Wall as it fell in 1989

In November 1989, East German guards stood down as crowds surged across the nearly 100-mile barrier encircling West Berlin. Thousands celebrated the wall’s sudden irrelevance and collapse. This ABC News report captures the moment’s upheaval and joy.

The 1978 prediction of the Kessler syndrome popularized the risks of space trash

A paper published by NASA scientists Don Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais described a scenario where the density of objects in orbit becomes so high that collisions between them create a cascading effect of runaway debris, preventing future space travel. The risks were confirmed from returned telescope parts showing debris impacts.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

In 1999, Microsoft and Intel’s addition signaled the information tech era for the Dow

Microsoft and Intel became the first information technology firms added to the DJIA. Their inclusion marked a turning point—the digital revolution and tech began to drive the American economy.

1970s New York was viewed by many as a city in decline

By 1975, the city owed $5B to $6B in short-term debt; over a million manufacturing jobs had left the city since the end of World War II. Meanwhile, the murder rate was more than double than 10 years earlier. Graffiti was seen as illegal vandalism perpetrated by unsupervised teenagers and was viewed by some as emblematic of the larger societal decline.

The concept of 'screen time' was invented in 1991

Mother Jones magazine coined the term in an essay called "Primal Screen" about children's television habits. Writer David Engelhardt wrote that they were watching “screens within screens within screens,” and that even babies were averaging an “hour and a half of screen time a day...the typical older child, about four hours."

The financial crisis in 2008 had a major impact on many 401(k) plans

Amid the 2008 financial crisis, stocks and bonds cratered as the broader market floundered due to the subprime mortgage crisis. Investors with so-called "target-date" funds—which shift allocations based on the maturation of a fund—shared in the slump, with some funds declining by 20% or more just a year or two away from maturation.

Brandi Chastain, the star of the 1999 US victory over China in the 1999 Women's World Cup, was a last-second choice to take the penalty kick that sealed the victory.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

Brandi Chastain, the star of the 1999 US victory over China in the 1999 Women's World Cup, was a last-second choice to take the penalty kick that sealed the victory.

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Watch contemporary footage covering the US-backed Shah of Iran fleeing the country in the face of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

US housing costs have risen by roughly 175% between 1991 and 2026—but a growing number of Gen Zers are becoming homeowners anyway. In 2025, 4% of homebuyers were Gen Z, up from 3% the year before.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume and cost roughly $33M to produce in 2004—about $57M in today's dollars.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

The hormonal disorder PCOS was renamed PMOS in 2026, a move designed to improve care and research by shifting the focus to the hormonal causes of this condition that affects 1 in 8 women.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that was home to an estimated population of 200,000 to 400,000.

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.