This Changed Everything

Vox has been explaining for an entire decade. We’ve published thousands upon thousands of articles, videos, and podcasts about nearly every subject imaginable, illuminating all the important and interesting and confounding things that give us a better understanding of who we are and how our world works. It’s been a wild time! To say so much has happened would be a gross understatement.

Our staff has taken the opportunity of our 10th anniversary to look back at the moments that defined the past decade. Rather than rehashing how, say, the Covid pandemic impacted public health in America, we’ve focused our attention on the unexpected — both small-scale incidents that foretold big-deal changes and huge events that had surprising consequences.

There are stories on everything from the rise of self-care to the death of George Floyd, a not-at-all-comprehensive list of pivotal turning points from reporters across the newsroom, accompanying Today, Explained episodes, and a text and video forecast of what the next decade could look like, from Future Perfect.

The (wild! scary! surprising!) moments that mattered.

The commodification of an activist concept turned a revitalizing practice into an isolating one.

by Allie Volpe

We are living in an era of conservative grievance politics.

by Fabiola Cineas

From drones to social media, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan was a preview of Ukraine and the conflicts to come.

by Joshua Keating

The ominously perfect meme marked the splintering of our shared reality.

by Brian Resnick

The show that helped to free Adnan Syed completely upended how much the average person knows about US legal and prison systems.

by Aja Romano

Obesity will go down, electric cars will go up, and a nuclear bomb might just fall.