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Twenty-seven kilometres of ring, deep underground near Geneva. For more than two years, beams of protons had been accelerated to almost the speed of light and smashed into each other inside it. Nobody in the auditorium had slept much.

At CERN, outside Geneva, the numbers finally held. CMS, one of two enormous detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, had reached a local significance of 4.9 sigma at a mass of 125.3 GeV. ATLAS, the other detector, designed and built by thousands of people over two decades, had come in at five sigma. Two machines, two answers, and they matched.

The particle had been hunted for almost fifty years. It was the last thing the standard model of matter still predicted and nobody had ever seen, the missing piece thought to hand every other particle its mass. Someone had called it the God particle, and the name annoyed the physicists who had given their careers to finding it. In December 2011, the ATLAS and CMS teams had each reported tantalising hints of a Higgs-like boson, though those readings carried only three sigma of confidence, enough to quicken the pulse and not enough to say the word out loud.

On the morning of July 4, 2012, a single seminar links the CERN auditorium to a hall in Melbourne, where the International Conference on High Energy Physics is already underway. The two collaborations have spent the run kept blind to each other's numbers, each analysing its own data so that neither team could nudge its result toward the other's answer. One after the other, they read out what they have found.

ATLAS puts its local significance at five sigma, the threshold physicists hold before they will use the word discovery, a less than one-in-a-million chance the signal is only a fluke. Both detectors settle on the same object: a particle with a mass of 125 to 126 gigaelectronvolts, roughly 130 times the mass of a proton. Two experiments, built and run by separate teams, arrive at the same place along the mass scale. It is the most massive boson anyone has ever seen.

The theory itself was old by now. Robert Brout, one of the physicists who had first worked out how the particle could give mass to matter, had died in 2011, a year before the detectors settled on their number. He did not hear the announcement.

Propane fire cracked overhead every few minutes, lit by a machine so the pilot could sleep. Inside the Kevlar cube a custom heater held the air somewhere between 4 and 21 degrees. Steve Fossett breathed bottled oxygen and waited for a wind to carry him east.

In July 2002 he was flying the Bud Light Spirit of Freedom above Queensland, Australia, on his sixth solo attempt since 1996 to become the first person to circle the world alone in a balloon. The Chicago-based aviator had nearly died chasing it before: in August 1998 his balloon ruptured in a thunderstorm and he fell 8,900 metres into the Coral Sea, surviving 23 hours in a life raft before rescue. This time the balloon was holding. The circle was nearly closed.

Fossett was a Chicago-based aviator who had chased this one circle since 1996. He launched the Bud Light Spirit of Freedom from Northam, in western Australia, on June 19, 2002. The envelope was a Rozière, a combination of helium and hot air, built by Donald Cameron of Cameron Balloons in Bristol, England. The type took its name from Pilâtre de Rozier, who made the first manned balloon flight in 1783. This was his sixth try. Five earlier ones had ended with the circle still open.

The Rozière stacked a helium cell on top and a hot-air cone below, and the burners warmed the air, which warmed the helium above to give him lift. A Comstock Autopilot fired those burners on its own to hold a constant altitude, which was the only reason he could close his eyes at all. He averaged three hours of sleep a day, taken in cat naps of forty-five minutes or less.

Between them he ate MREs, military meals ready to eat that he warmed with chemical heat packs and a little water. He reached Mission Control over the Inmarsat C satellite system, with a satellite telephone held in reserve as backup. The wind held east, and the circle drew closed.

On July 4, 2002, he set the capsule down in Queensland, Australia, fourteen days and 19 hours after lifting off from Northam. He was the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon.

Four years earlier the sea had him. The balloon he was flying then came apart and dropped him into the water, and he climbed into a life raft and stayed there twenty-three hours, alone, waiting for someone to come. No wind carried him that time; he simply floated and counted the hours until rescue.

Business buildings where rice had grown. Along both banks of the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok, hotels and restaurants stood on ground that ten years earlier had been wet paddy fields. The water still moved past them the same way.

By 1997, that transformation marked how far Thailand's economy had climbed. The fields that had once lined both sides of the river were gone, built over as the money came in. In Bangkok, the change was easy to see from the water. What had been rice was now concrete, glass, and the business of a boom.

The money that built those towers came from abroad. Since the early 1990s foreign capital had poured into Thailand, drawn to a currency the government had fixed to the US dollar and to banks that ranked among the world's most profitable. More than fifty banks and non-bank financial institutions had emerged to move it, and much of what they lent went into real estate. Jeffrey Sachs, the economist, warned that under-capitalized banks had every incentive to borrow abroad and lend at home with reckless abandon, because the owners bore little of the risk themselves.

By 1995 the growth had slowed. China had risen as a trade competitor, and world demand for semiconductors, one of Thailand's major exports, fell in 1996. On February 5, 1997, Somprasong became the first Thai company to miss a foreign-debt repayment.

The speculators came for the baht, betting its dollar peg could not hold. A speculative attack is a concerted move against a currency, and the smaller the economy, the harder it tends to be hit. The Bank of Thailand, the country's central bank, met them in the forward market, committing dollars it did not have on hand to hold the fixed rate. It kept at this until a new finance minister opened the books and found that $28 billion of the country's $30 billion in international reserves was already spent.

On July 2, 1997, Thailand gave up. It abandoned the fixed peg and switched to a flexible exchange rate regime, letting the baht find its own value on the market rather than pinning it to the dollar. The currency had traded in a narrow band between 24.91 and 25.59 to the dollar; it now fell 15 to 20 percent at once, to 28.80.

It kept falling. By December the baht reached 48.80 to the dollar, the lowest since Thailand began keeping records in 1969, a decline of more than 50 percent across the second half of the year.

Malaysia sat next door, exposed to the same crisis and the same fleeing capital. Over the same period, it held its foreign direct investment proportion above 90 percent.

Smoke. A helicopter dropped into the prison courtyard and two men in black came down out of it, angle grinders already in their hands.

It was 1 July 2018, at Réau prison in France. The pilot had set down in the one courtyard not fitted with anti-helicopter netting, which had fallen out of use. The two accomplices lit smoke bombs and cut through the visiting-room doors to reach Rédoine Faïd, a convicted armed robber. Ten minutes later the breakout was over and he was gone.

Rédoine Faïd was born in 1972 and grew up in a rough quarter north of Paris. By the 1990s he was running a gang that pulled armed robberies and extortion across the capital, and he never hid where the choreography came from. He made no secret of his inspiration. He had watched the 1995 heist film Heat seven times in the cinema and a hundred times on DVD, and at a Paris film festival he once walked up to the film's director, Michael Mann, and introduced himself as Mann's technical adviser. Arrested in 1998 after three years on the run through Switzerland and Israel, where he disguised himself as an ultra-Orthodox Jew and learned Hebrew, he turned the story into a book, and French police took to calling him L'Écrivain, the writer. Underneath the celebrity ran a darker line: in 2010 a robbery he masterminded ended with a twenty-six-year-old policewoman, Aurélie Fouquet, shot dead.

Around nine o'clock on the morning of Sunday 1 July 2018, two men walk into a small flying club at Fontenay-Trésigny, east of Paris, and introduce themselves as a father and son booked for a first-time flying lesson. Once the rotors are turning and the aircraft is up, the instructor becomes a hostage, and the helicopter is turned southeast toward Réau, fifty kilometres from Paris, where the Sud-Francilien prison stands.

At about a quarter past eleven the helicopter drops into the prison courtyard. The armed accomplices move straight to the visiting room, where Faïd is sitting with his brother. The wardens are unarmed, and they flee and raise the alarm. Ten minutes after the skids touched the ground, the helicopter lifts off again with Faïd aboard, and he is gone.

The cameras loved the helicopter and the angle grinders and the smoke. Aurélie Fouquet was twenty-six, a policewoman, and in 2010 she was shot dead in a robbery Faïd had masterminded. She does not appear in any of the footage.

Twenty-two feet of metal, taller than a two-story house, falling silently toward Saturn. Inside its body, twelve science instruments waited. The generators kept producing their 885 watts, the same power they had carried since launch.

On October 15, 1997, Cassini-Huygens lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, atop a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket. The orbiter stood 22 feet high and 13.1 feet wide. Over the mission it would fire its main engine 183 times. This was the spacecraft now arriving at Saturn.

To reach Saturn, Cassini did not fly toward it. The spacecraft first fell inward, toward the Sun. On April 26, 1998, it swung past Venus at 176 miles, then came back for a second Venus pass on June 24, 1999, this time at 370 miles. Less than two months later, on August 18, 1999, it crossed Earth at 727 miles, borrowing speed from the planet it had just left behind. The last push came at Jupiter on December 30, 2000, six million miles out, with closest approach at 5:12 a.m. EST. Each pass added velocity the rocket alone could never have given it, and the path that looked like a detour was the only way the mass could be flung that far.

On June 30, 2004, Pacific Daylight Time, Cassini fires its main engine at 7:36 p.m. to slow itself down and let Saturn's gravity pull it into orbit. At Saturn's distance the one-way radio signal takes between sixty-seven and eighty-five minutes to reach Earth, so the burn runs on commands loaded in advance, and the team in Pasadena watches a result that has already happened. It is one of the 183 firings the main engine will perform over the mission, and it is the one that turns a seven-year, 2.1-billion-mile cruise into an orbit.

The burn holds, and Cassini settles into its path around the planet. On December 24, 2004, it releases the Huygens probe, the descent craft ESA built to ride down through an atmosphere, toward Titan, Saturn's largest moon. On January 14, 2005, Huygens falls through Titan's thick air under parachute and touches the surface, the first landing on a moon in the outer solar system.

The Narrow Angle Camera, part of Cassini's Imaging Science Subsystem, would eventually return 453,048 images. From May 2001 to early 2002, before any of them, it sent back hazy, unusable frames, the optics fogged by a contamination problem. The instrument built to see Saturn could not yet see anything clearly.

Empty battery packs. The crew pulled out the hand-held LIDAR laser rangefinder and found nothing inside it, no batteries installed at all. They rigged it to draw power from the Orbiter through a break-out box and kept closing on the target.

On June 29, 1995, high above Lake Baikal, Atlantis moved toward the Mir space station. It was the first joint United States-Russian docking since 1975, when the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project last brought the two nations' spacecraft together, and the first of seven planned Shuttle-Mir missions during Phase 1 of the Space Station Program. The Orbiter Docking System, developed jointly by RSC Energia of Kaliningrad, Rockwell International of Downey, California, and NASA, had been powered up for the approach. At its heart sat the Androgynous Peripheral Docking System, a 632-pound Russian-built mechanism with a three-petal capture ring mounted on six interconnected ball screw shock absorbers.

Robert "Hoot" Gibson, a U.S. Navy captain on his fifth spaceflight, commanded Atlantis from the front deck, with pilot Charles Precourt beside him. Behind them rode the two men they were delivering, Mir-19 Commander Anatoly Solovyev on his fourth flight and Flight Engineer Nikolai Budarin on his first. Weather had already scrubbed two attempts. The launch set for June 23 died when lightning kept the team from loading propellant into the External Tank, a second try on June 24 fell apart near the end of the T-9 minute hold, and a three-day stand-down followed the forecast of more of the same.

Up on Mir, Norman Thagard had been waiting since March 14, when he became the first American astronaut launched into orbit on a Russian rocket. He had ridden up with the Mir-18 crew, Commander Vladimir Dezhurov and Flight Engineer Gennady Strekalov, and every scrubbed launch left the three of them in orbit a little longer.

Atlantis rises toward Mir along the R-Bar, the Earth radius vector, climbing from a point directly below the station so the thin pull of the atmosphere helps brake the closing rate instead of fuel. Partway up the approach, General Purpose Computer number four falls out of step with GPC 1, which declares it failed, most likely a radiation upset that flipped a bit somewhere in its memory. Gibson keeps flying.

He brings the Orbiter in at a closing rate very near the targeted 0.1 foot per second. The two spacecraft touch over Lake Baikal, and at the instant of contact the lateral misalignment is less than one inch and the angular misalignment less than half a degree on every axis. Capture comes at 13:00:13.9 Greenwich mean time.

The peak axial load runs to about 1,000 kilograms, roughly half what the six ball-screw shock absorbers are built to absorb. Eight minutes later the twelve structural latches drive home at 13:08:17.9 Greenwich mean time, and Atlantis and Mir become one machine.

The whole approach had come down to inches and fractions of a degree, the kind of accuracy you build six interconnected ball screw shock absorbers to receive. And the hand-held LIDAR laser rangefinder that helped read the closing distance had been pulled out empty, its battery packs holding nothing, the batteries never installed. The crew wired it into the Orbiter through a break-out box and went on closing the gap.

A mouthpiece on the canvas.

On the night of June 28, 1997, in Las Vegas, the rematch between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield ended when Tyson bit Holyfield's ear. "He spit out his mouthpiece and bit me in the ear," Holyfield said afterward. Tyson, along with his co-managers John Horne and Rory Holloway, then tried to climb into the stands. Police restrained all three.

Mike Tyson came into the ring a onetime heavyweight champion. He had a new trainer now, Richie Giachetti, who promised that this time Tyson would box a technician's fight, all patience and angles instead of fury. That was the line going in, the plan for the rematch. The referee was a late substitution. Mills Lane had been anointed for the job only twenty-four hours before the opening bell, a stranger handed the third man's authority over two of the hardest men alive on a single day's notice.

Fifteen seconds in, the two men clinch. In the last ten seconds of the first round the crowd starts up, "Holyfield, Holyfield," a chant for the other man. In the second round their heads collide and Tyson comes away bleeding from his right eye; he would write later, in his autobiography Undisputed Truth, that the head-butts were so overt anyone watching could see them.

Then, in the third, Tyson spits out his mouthpiece, leans in, and bites a hunk out of Holyfield's right ear, spitting the flesh onto the canvas. With thirty-three seconds left Holyfield turns his back and howls. Officials deduct two points, and Mills Lane warns Tyson that another bite means disqualification. In the final ten seconds Tyson bites the other ear.

Lane disqualifies him, ending the bout in Holyfield's favor on the spot, the kind of ruling that hands the loss to a fighter for breaking the rules rather than for being beaten, and a melee begins. Tyson charges Holyfield's corner and swings at a Las Vegas policeman trying to keep order. Holyfield, who had won all three rounds on the cards, is led away missing part of his right ear.

Mitch Halpern had the job first, the referee originally assigned to the rematch. He withdrew on his own, saying the controversy was taking too much away from the fight.

"99 Fake Street." That was the address printed on a Motorola phone contract folded inside a Verizon bag, dropped into a Brooklyn garbage can, under a customer name that read Irine Kutsov. The FBI had been watching the hand that let it go.

For years the bureau had run a multi-year investigation into a network of United States-based agents of the SVR, the foreign intelligence service of the Russian Federation, run out of a Moscow headquarters its own people called Center. The network was built of deep-cover agents known as Illegals, operatives working without diplomatic cover, an alleged conspiracy that stretched from about the 1990s up to the present. Some used their own names, like Anna Chapman, the woman who had tossed the bag. Others lived behind invented ones, a couple calling themselves Richard and Cynthia Murphy who had bought a house in New Jersey.

For ten Wednesdays between January and June of 2010, agents watched Anna Chapman drift into the vicinity of a Russian government official who came and went through the doors of the Russian Mission to the United Nations, a man the FBI's complaint would name only as Russian Government Official #1. Whatever passed between them passed without a word, machine to machine, her laptop reaching toward his as the two of them sat near each other in coffee shops and bookstores. On April 7 the official broke off one of those exchanges, having caught the shape of FBI surveillance moving around him.

The bureau kept watching. Chapman's own line ran back to Moscow, to a father who was a KGB veteran working inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the kind of inheritance that does not show up on a Verizon contract or a Brooklyn lease.

On Saturday, June 26, around eleven in the morning, an undercover FBI agent calls Anna Chapman in Russian and asks her to come into New York from Connecticut, where she has been spending the weekend. The next day, June 27, the bureau's cameras catch Semenko, another of the illegals operating under his own name, sliding a newspaper into a drop site in Arlington at about 11:06; agents pull it back out at 11:50.

That day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the couple who have lived as Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley take their elder son, Tim, who turns twenty that day, and his younger brother Alex out to an Indian restaurant near the house. Back at the home, a team of black-clad men carrying a battering ram comes to the door and enters shouting "FBI!", while a second team comes through the back. An agent tells the two brothers their parents have been arrested on suspicion of being "unlawful agents of a foreign government."

The search-and-seizure warrant for the residence lists 191 items carried out the door. A few days later the brothers hear on the radio that ten Russian spies have been rounded up across the United States, the closing act of an FBI effort called Operation Ghost Stories.

The charge that came down was conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government. Espionage was not among the counts. Across a network built over something like two decades, no classified information had reached Moscow.

A map, unrolled across a table in the East Room. Nearly two centuries earlier, Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis had spread one out in that same room, the record of an expedition across the American frontier to the Pacific. Now scientists laid down a different kind of map, almost 3 billion letters long.

At 10:19 A.M. on June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton stepped into the East Room of the White House to announce the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Prime Minister Tony Blair joined by satellite from the State Dining Room at 10 Downing Street, flanked by the Nobel laureates Fred Sanger and Max Perutz. Secretary Richardson stood among those gathered in the East Room; Secretary Shalala could not attend. For the first time, the human species could read the chemical letters of its own genetic code.

The work had deep roots. Less than fifty years earlier a young Englishman named Francis Crick and a younger American named James Watson had found the elegant structure of the genetic code, and Watson announced it in the journal Nature. Fifteen years before this morning, leaders at the Department of Energy, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Institutes of Health set the public project in motion, with Charles DeLisi of the Department of Energy and Watson, by then at Cold Spring Harbor, helping to start it and Ari Patrinos of the Department of Energy pushing it forward in the United States. Dr. Francis Collins, the geneticist who had found the cystic fibrosis gene in 1989, took the lead, directing an international team of more than a thousand scientists across six nations for seven years, most of the sequencing done in the final fifteen months once the consortium could read a thousand letters of code each second, around the clock.

The public consortium was not working alone. On September 8, 1999, a private company called Celera Genomics, led by Dr. Craig Venter, began its own run at the human genome from a lab eighteen miles from the White House, using the whole genome shotgun method that essentially the same team had pioneered five years earlier at the Institute for Genomic Research.

In the East Room, Clinton turned to the man whose discovery had made the morning possible. "Dr. Watson, the way you announced your discovery in the journal 'Nature,' was one of the great understatements of all time. This structure has novel features, which are of considerable biological interest," he said, reading back the sentence that had once described the double helix. Then he reached further back, to Galileo, who had claimed centuries before that he had learned the language in which God created the universe, and offered his own version: "Today, we are learning the language in which God created life." He noted that in genetic terms all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same, and Dr. Francis Collins, the geneticist directing the public consortium, answered the thought directly: "I'm happy that today, the only race we are talking about is the human race." Collins quoted Alexander Pope, "Know then thyself. Presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man," and reminded the room that "Today is most certainly not the end of genomics, but perhaps it's the end of the beginning."

Dr. Craig Venter, the head of Celera Genomics who had once served in the medical corps in Vietnam thirty-three years earlier, opened by noting he was shorter than the previous two speakers, then placed the day on a longer scale: "Today, June 26, in the year 2000, marks an historic point in the 100,000-year record of humanity." He added that in the five Celera genomes there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another. The two efforts had arrived from different directions: the international consortium had built a map of overlapping fragments covering 97 percent of the human genome and had sequenced 85 percent of it, while Celera, nine months after starting its own run, had completed a first assembly of the sequence.

Clinton set the next mark before the room dispersed, a goal to finish a virtually error-free final draft of the genome before the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the double helix. Later that afternoon, at 12:30, Celera was scheduled to describe its own first assembly of the human genetic code at a joint press conference.

Collins had directed the public consortium toward a code that named the genes behind disease. His sister-in-law, a marionette artist, had died of breast cancer.

Black and yellow. A convertible Mustang, the dream car, waiting somewhere in Jeddah for a road its owner had never legally been allowed to drive on.

Sahar Nassif, a campaigner, told the BBC from Jeddah that she was "very, very excited - jumping up and down and laughing." In 2018 Saudi Arabia officially lifted its ban on women driving. The decision came to a country that had only recently let women into National Day celebrations for the first time, a night of fireworks and light shows and a concert at King Fahd International Stadium in Riyadh. Nassif already knew what she would buy.

Until the decree, Saudi Arabia was the only country on earth that banned women from driving. Only men held licences. Women who drove in public risked arrest and fines, and some were imprisoned, so many families employed private drivers, and an estimated 800,000 foreign chauffeurs, imported from south and south-east Asia, ferried Saudi women around. The ban sat inside a wider system of gender segregation, where Saudi law enforced a strict form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism and a woman needed her male guardian's permission to travel, work, or reach a hospital.

For years, rights groups in the kingdom had pushed against it. Manal al-Sharif, who organised the Women2Drive campaign, had been imprisoned for driving, and Loujain al-Hathloul had spent 73 days in detention in 2014 for the same act of crossing into the country behind the wheel.

The order comes on 26 September 2017. King Salman issues a decree saying women will be allowed to drive, with a ministerial body to be set up within thirty days to advise on how it will work, the whole thing to take effect by 24 June 2018. The decree falls in line with Vision 2030, the programme that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman promotes to modernise Saudi society.

The words come fast. Loujain al-Hathloul tweets two of them, "thank God." Manal al-Sharif says the country would "never be the same again." Prince Khaled bin Salman calls it "an historic and big day." The US state department welcomes the move as "a great step in the right direction."

Then 24 June 2018 arrives, and for the first time Saudi women can legally drive.

In May 2018, weeks before the ban lifted, Loujain al-Hathloul was detained. She had tweeted "thank God" when the decree came. Now she sat in a cell as the date she had pushed toward drew closer.

A birthday pizza, shared early, at a private house. Edward Snowden ate it with his lawyers a few days before he turned thirty. He was a former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, and he had gone public in Hong Kong on June 9, 2013 as the source of disclosures about classified surveillance programs.

On June 21, his thirtieth birthday, Snowden was on the 21st floor of a skyscraper in a fashionable Hong Kong neighbourhood, inside the Russian Consulate. That same day, U.S. authorities revealed he had been charged with theft of government property and two violations of the Espionage Act. According to Kommersant, he had purchased an Aeroflot ticket to fly from Hong Kong to Havana, through Moscow. He arrived in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport from Hong Kong on June 23.

A WikiLeaks staffer named Sarah Harrison had joined Snowden in Hong Kong and become his adviser. On June 22, the day before he flew, the United States revoked his passport. He left anyway.

Willy Lam, a political analyst at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said "The decision was basically made in Beijing not to send him to the U.S." Simon N.M. Young, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong who had been monitoring the case closely, called the departure "a shocker."

On the morning of June 23, the Chinese government made its final decision to let Snowden leave Hong Kong, a city that holds an extradition treaty with the United States. He boarded an Aeroflot flight, Russia's national airline, the carrier on which he had bought a Hong Kong–Moscow–Havana ticket. Shortly after the plane cleared Chinese airspace, WikiLeaks released a statement saying it had assisted his political asylum in a democratic country, arranged his travel papers, and secured his safe exit from Hong Kong. He landed in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, the zone where travelers wait between flights without formally entering Russia.

Havana was supposed to be the next leg. He never made it. Kommersant quoted unnamed Russian officials saying the Cubans, under American pressure, decided to refuse him entry, leaving him stranded inside the transit zone with no Russian visa and no asylum documents, his passport already revoked by Washington the day before he flew.

Behind him, Hong Kong had been arguing over his case. Hundreds of residents marched on the U.S. consulate in support of him, though the two Los Angeles Times accounts disagree on when: one dates the march to June 15, the other to June 22, the day before he left.

He had gone public as the source of disclosures about domestic surveillance, the watcher of ordinary citizens. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence later found that the vast majority of the documents pertained to military, defence, and intelligence operations, not domestic privacy programmes.

Small bells of static, then nothing. The tape recorder in the Virginia debriefing room stopped while William Jones was mid-sentence, describing where each person stood and the firing of the shots. The audiotape was said to run from 4:16 p.m. to 6:16 p.m., but it holds only about an hour and three-quarters of material.

On August 6, 1997, in that debriefing room, a prosecutor named Cathy E. Krinick stopped the recorder as Jones gave his account of the 1996 killing of Eric Nesbitt. Jones, the co-defendant in a capital murder case, was telling his version of how Nesbitt was robbed, forced to withdraw money, and killed. He would be sentenced to life in prison. The man tried alongside him, Atkins, would be sentenced to death.

Daryl Atkins was the petitioner, convicted of capital murder and related crimes by a Virginia jury and sentenced to death. He argued that he could not be executed because he is mentally retarded. The Virginia Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and sentence, leaning on Penry v. Lynaugh, the Supreme Court's earlier decision that had let such executions stand. In Penry, the Court had counted only two state statutes that prohibited executing mentally retarded offenders, and even added to the fourteen States that had rejected capital punishment entirely, it found no national consensus. The numbers were small. By the time Atkins's case reached the Court again, just over a decade after Penry, a significant number of States had concluded that death was not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal, and not a single State had moved in the other direction.

On June 20, 2002, Justice John Paul Stevens delivers the opinion of the Court. The Court holds that executing a mentally retarded criminal is a "cruel and unusual" punishment barred by the Eighth Amendment, the clause under which a penalty is forbidden when it is not graduated and proportioned to the offense. Excessiveness, Stevens writes, is measured against the country's currently prevailing standards of decency, read through objective factors such as the legislation the states have enacted. By that count a significant number of states had decided death was not a suitable punishment for such an offender, and not one had moved the other way. The judgment of the Virginia Supreme Court is reversed and remanded.

Clinical definitions of mental retardation ask for subaverage intellectual functioning together with significant limitations in adaptive skills, conditions that, by the Court's account, leave a person with a diminished capacity to reason, to learn from experience, and to control impulses. The severity of a punishment, the Court reasons, must be proportioned to the offender's own culpability. Against the two justifications that underpin the death penalty, retribution and deterrence, the Court finds a serious question whether either reaches a mentally retarded offender, whose lesser blame does not earn death and whose impairments dull the deterrent force of the threat.

The same prosecutors who stopped the tape worked Jones's account over until it matched the physical evidence and put the gun in Atkins's hand, naming him the triggerman. That label was what made him eligible for death in the first place. It was built, in part, in a room where the recorder did not run the whole time.

Dark scoreboards. On the night of March 11, 2020, the NBA suspended its season until further notice, becoming the first major American sports league to shut down because of COVID-19.

That same evening, actor Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had tested positive for the virus. He had been working in Australia when they both fell ill. A basketball season and one of the most recognizable faces on earth vanished from public life within hours of each other, and neither came with a return date.

Italy had recorded 12,462 cases and 827 deaths by March 11, more than any country outside China, and Premier Giuseppe Conte ordered all shops and businesses except pharmacies and grocery stores to close. Iran followed with 354 deaths, third in the world, and nearly 10,000 cases across the Middle East had been traced to the country or to travelers who passed through it. Iran's senior vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, had himself been diagnosed.

In the United States, Washington state led the country with 29 deaths, San Francisco and Washington state had banned large gatherings, and Seattle officials announced school closures that would send roughly 53,000 students home. The outbreak was accelerating. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, testified before Congress that same day. "Bottom line, it's going to get worse."

At the World Health Organization's Geneva headquarters, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stepped to the microphone and used a word his organization had been avoiding for weeks. COVID-19, he said, was now a pandemic, a classification the WHO defines as sustained outbreaks occurring in multiple regions of the world simultaneously. More than 126,000 people in 114 countries had been infected, and more than 4,600 were dead. "We are deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction." He did not frame the label as a surrender. "All countries can still change the course of this pandemic. If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilize their people in the response."

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,464 points that day, falling twenty percent below the record high it had set the previous month and crossing the line Wall Street calls a bear market, the threshold where a stock index has lost a fifth of its peak value. The NCAA announced that its March Madness tournament would be played to empty arenas. Both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders canceled their campaign rallies. Italy designated billions in financial relief. Iran reported a single-day jump of sixty-two deaths.

Forty-one slides. A single PowerPoint file, stamped top-secret, its cover dated April 2013, outlining how the National Security Agency pulled data from the servers of America's largest technology companies. The file had a name: PRISM.

In June 2013, The Guardian published details from that forty-one-slide presentation, verified by the newspaper's own editorial process, revealing a surveillance apparatus that had operated in silence. The document had been designed to train intelligence operatives on the program's capabilities. Its existence was never meant to leave the classified briefing rooms where analysts learned how to use it.

Edward Snowden grew up in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, before his family relocated to Maryland, close to the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. After breaking both legs during Army training, he took a job as a security guard at an NSA facility at the University of Maryland, then moved into IT security work for the CIA. By 2007, the agency had stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. He left the CIA in 2009 and shifted to a private contractor role at an NSA facility on a military base in Japan.

He was one of approximately 850,000 Americans who held top-secret clearance. In March 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a Senate intelligence committee hearing that the NSA does not collect data on millions of Americans. The infrastructure Snowden had spent years inside was, by then, already collecting it.

On May 20, 2013, a twenty-nine-year-old employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a former technical assistant for the CIA who had never finished his computing coursework at a community college in Maryland, boarded a flight to Hong Kong. Edward Snowden checked into a hotel and barely left. He lined the door with pillows to block eavesdropping, and every time he typed a password he pulled a large red hood over his head and laptop to defeat hidden cameras he feared were watching from the ceiling. He left the room a total of approximately three times during his entire stay. He earned roughly $200,000 a year and had shared a home in Hawaii with his girlfriend. He had given all of it up to sit in that room, waiting for the stories to publish.

On June 5, 2013, The Guardian published a top-secret court order compelling Verizon to turn over telephone records of millions of American customers, issued under the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act. The next day, the newspaper revealed PRISM: a program authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, enacted in 2008, which empowered the NSA to compel technology companies to turn over information about their users without individual warrants. The slides showed when each company had joined: Yahoo in 2008, Google, Facebook, and PalTalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, Skype and AOL in 2011, Apple in 2012. More than 77,000 intelligence reports had cited the program, with over 2,000 PRISM-based reports issued every month. On June 9, The Guardian revealed Snowden's identity, at his own request, transforming an anonymous document leak into a named act by a single person against the infrastructure he had spent years inside.

Giant screens glowed white against the old stones of the Circus Maximus. More than 150,000 people stood where chariot teams once ran, watching a football match played a thousand kilometers north. When Fabio Grosso's penalty hit the net, they jumped into the Trevi Fountain.

On July 9, 2006, in Berlin, Italy met France for the FIFA World Cup final. Italy arrived wounded: defender Alessandro Nesta, 30, had not played since limping off against the Czech Republic in the group stage, and team doctor Enrico Castellacci had confirmed from the squad's Duisburg base, "He's definitely not available." Argentine referee Horacio Elizondo, who had once sent off David Beckham, the Manchester United midfielder, at the 2000 World Club Championship in Brazil, walked to the center circle. The two lineups faced each other under floodlights, and Zinedine Zidane stepped up first.

The two nations carried unfinished business. France had eliminated Italy on penalties in the 1998 World Cup quarter-final. Two years later, at Euro 2000, Italy held a 1-0 lead deep into stoppage time before Sylvain Wiltord, a French substitute forward, equalised in the 93rd minute. David Trezeguet, another substitute, then smashed a left-footed golden goal in extra time to take the trophy 2-1. Italy remembered.

Marco Materazzi, the defender expected alongside captain Fabio Cannavaro in Nesta's absence, lined up at center-back. Behind them stood Gianluigi Buffon, Italy's goalkeeper, who had not been beaten by any opposition player in the entire 2006 tournament. Elizondo, the man who had sent off England striker Wayne Rooney earlier in the competition for stamping on Portugal's Ricardo Carvalho, raised the whistle.

Seven minutes in, France's Florent Malouda burst into the penalty area and Materazzi caught his foot. Zidane chipped the spot kick onto the underside of the crossbar; the ball dropped inside the goal line and spun back out. Until that moment, Buffon had not been beaten by any opposition player in the entire tournament; Italy's only goal conceded had come off the boot of their own Cristian Zaccardo. It was Zidane's third goal in a World Cup final, putting him level with Pelé, Vavá, and Geoff Hurst. Twelve minutes later, Italy's Andrea Pirlo curled a corner from the right and Materazzi, the same man who had given away the penalty, rose above the French defence to head the equaliser.

The score held at 1-1 through ninety minutes and into extra time before 69,000 in Berlin. In the 110th minute, Materazzi had been tugging Zidane's shirt; Zidane told him to stop and offered to swap jerseys after the match. Then Zidane turned and drove his forehead into Materazzi's chest. Elizondo did not see it; the assistant referee informed him, and he showed the red card. In what Zidane had announced would be his last professional match, he walked off as the fourth player sent off in a World Cup final, after France's Marcel Desailly in 1998 and Argentina's Pedro Monzón and Gustavo Dezotti in 1990.

A glass case in Edinburgh. Behind it, a sheep stands on a custom-built fibreglass frame, wool still thick, eyes fixed on nothing. She has been there for more than twenty years.

Her name was Dolly. In February 1997, scientists at the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh announced they had cloned a living mammal from an adult cell, a cell taken from the mammary gland of a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep. That donor sheep was already dead when the frozen cells were used. Dolly, born the previous July, was the proof that a single stored udder cell could rewrite what biology was supposed to allow.

For decades, nuclear transfer had been used in mammals as a method for multiplying elite embryos, and every live offspring produced this way had come from embryo cells or embryo-derived cells during primary culture. In 1984, researchers in Cambridge cloned the first mammal, a sheep, from an embryo cell. By 1995, a team at the Roslin Institute led by Professor Sir Ian Wilmut, alongside Keith Campbell, a nuclear transfer researcher, and colleague Bill Ritchie, had cloned two sheep named Megan and Morag from embryonic cells grown in the lab. In 1996, Campbell, co-author Jim McWhir, Ritchie, and their colleagues published in Nature the first report of live lambs produced by nuclear transfer from an established cultured cell line. No one had crossed beyond that.

She was named after country singer Dolly Parton. The cell that produced her came from a mammary gland, and the scientists needed a name, so they reached for the most famous set of mammary glands they could think of.

On 5 July 1996, a Scottish Blackface ewe at the Roslin Institute delivered a white-faced lamb weighing 14.5 pounds. The white face was the first visible sign, before any DNA test, that the lamb had nothing genetically in common with the dark-faced sheep that carried her. Six other sheep, cloned from embryonic and foetal cells, were born at Roslin around the same time, but this one was different: her nucleus had come from an adult mammary cell, starved of the serum that keeps cells dividing until it entered a state of quiescence, then fused with an enucleated egg using a pulse of electricity. Her birth was kept quiet for months while a patent application on the process worked its way through.

On 22 February 1997, the Roslin Institute went public. The lamb was seven months old. The paper landed in Nature the same day, and the institute fielded three thousand phone calls from around the world in the week that followed. PPL Therapeutics, a Scottish biotechnology firm that had bought the rights to the research, told reporters the work would improve understanding of ageing and genetics and lead to cheaper medicines. In Washington, President Bill Clinton convened a special task force to examine the legal and ethical implications of cloning. Randall Prather, a cloning expert at the University of Missouri, said her birth had "shattered theory in science."

Three legs on cold dirt.

Phoenix fell through the Martian atmosphere and set down at 23:53:44 UTC on May 25, 2008, on the flat valley floor of Vastitas Borealis, the broad lowland plain covering much of Mars's northern polar region. No spacecraft had ever landed this far north. It had launched on August 4, 2007, crossing 422 million miles to reach a site chosen because the orbiter Mars Odyssey had already confirmed ice lay just beneath the surface. Bolted to the lander's frame, a 7.7-foot robotic arm waited, built to dig into that permafrost and deliver soil and ice to the onboard laboratory deck, where instruments would look for chemical ingredients of life preserved in the frozen ground.

The mission grew from wreckage. In 1999, NASA lost a spacecraft during a Mars landing attempt, and the agency canceled a planned 2001 lander in response. The hardware built for that dead mission sat unused until 2002, when Mars Odyssey discovered that water ice lay just beneath the surface across much of high-latitude Mars. Peter Smith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, proposed resurrecting the stranded 2001 hardware and flying it north. NASA selected his proposal over twenty-four competitors, making Phoenix the first mission in the Mars Scout program.

Only five of Earth's previous eleven attempts to land on Mars had succeeded. In the months before Phoenix's arrival, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter fired its thrusters on February 6, 2008, to shift its orbit into position as a relay station for the descent.

Seven minutes before reaching the top of the atmosphere, Phoenix jettisoned its cruise stage, the support structure that had carried solar panels and kept the spacecraft alive across nine months of interplanetary flight. Batteries now provided the only power. The lander hit the thin Martian air at 5.7 kilometers per second and began the sequence engineers call entry, descent, and landing: a heat shield absorbing friction, then a parachute snapping open, then twelve descent rockets firing in pulses to walk the speed down. By the time the three legs touched soil, Phoenix was falling at roughly 2.4 meters per second. It was the first Mars landing on rockets rather than airbags since Viking 2 set down in 1976.

One minute after touchdown, Phoenix shut off its transmitter. Every watt of battery power went to unfolding the solar arrays that would keep the lander alive through the arctic summer. Mars Odyssey, orbiting overhead, had already tilted its antenna away from its normal downward view to track the descending lander, and Mars Express did the same, recording transmissions during the plunge as a backup. The confirmation signal, relayed through Odyssey, crossed the 15-minute light-travel gap and reached the Goldstone antenna station of NASA's Deep Space Network, the global system of large radio dishes that links Earth to its distant spacecraft, at 4:53:44 p.m. Pacific Time.

"What a thrilling landing!" Peter Smith said. "But the team is waiting impatiently for the next set of signals that will verify a healthy spacecraft." At JPL in Pasadena, at Lockheed Martin in Denver, and at the University of Arizona in Tucson, rooms full of people who had built or steered the machine broke into the same noise at the same moment.