Rewind to 26 February – 4 Mar 2006💔 Ne-Yo owns every breakup In My Own Words drops and suddenly So Sick is playing in bedrooms, buses and badly lit school dances everywhere. Smooth vocals, emotional honesty and ringtone...

🎧 iTunes hits one billion downloads Apple celebrates its billionth song purchase, officially crowning digital downloads king. The lucky buyer scores iPods, an iMac and bragging rights while white earbuds dominate buses everywhere.&nb...

Rewind to 12 – 18 Feb 2006💔 James Blunt makes everyone emotional “You’re Beautiful” becomes unavoidable worldwide, fuelling bus-window daydreams and breakup playlists everywhere. Turns out it’s actually about awkward ob...

Rewind to 5 Feb 2006 to 11 Feb 2006🦆 Dick Cheney shoots a guy The Vice President accidentally shoots a man during a quail hunt and the White House somehow lets a local newspaper break the story first. No immediate apolo...

Rewind to 29 Jan 2006 to 4 Feb 2006🇺🇸 State of the Union goes full time capsule George W. Bush lays out a world obsessed with terrorism, addicted to oil, anxious about immigration and still debating same-sex marriage as...

Rewind to 22 Jan 2006 to 28 Jan 2006🎤 High school musical rewires your personality Disney drops a made-for-TV movie and accidentally creates a global tween religion. Zac Efron becomes your entire emotional support syste...

🧻 Wikitorial wipeout. The LA Times tried letting the public edit their editorials. What they got instead? Porn, profanity and chaos in 36 hours. A short-lived democracy, quickly replaced by Ctrl+Alt+Nope.🦇 Batman begins again. ...

🐶 Who’s a cloned boy? Snuppy the Afghan hound becomes the world’s first cloned dog, born after 1,000 embryos, 123 surrogates and more ethical debates than a philosophy major on Red Bull.🎤 Mariah's not-so-comeback. The...

🧃 Belle Gibson enters Mel’s comments sectionIn one of the most unexpectedly cursed timeline moments of the year, Mel gets fact-checked by Belle Gibson — yes, that Belle Gibson — after she jumps into Mel’s Instagram...

📹 A dating fail that created YouTubeBefore it hosted cat videos, K-pop fancams and the entire cultural output of Gen Z, YouTube began as… a dating site. In 2005 its founders uploaded a “hot or not but for love” concept that failed...

🌴 Summer mode, nostalgia maxed outWe’re hitting pause on the weekly time machine to bring you a sun-soaked sampler platter of the most unhinged, delightful and ‘I can’t believe that actually happened’ moments from this year’s T Mi...

Rewind to 11 December 2005 to 17 December 2005🏖️ Cronulla hits boiling pointThis week in 2005, Australia watches in shock as long-simmering tensions in Cronulla erupt into one of the country’s most confronting racial...

Rewind to 4 December 2005 to 10 December 2005🧪 Two Aussies, one Nobel and a beaker of bacteriaOn a snowy Stockholm night, Dr Robin Warren and Professor Barry Marshall rewrite medical history — and humiliate decades o...

Rewind to 27 November 2005 to 3 December 2005🧬 A new face, a new futureIn France, surgeons pull off the world’s first partial face transplant on Isabelle Dinoire — a 15-hour medical marathon involving nerves...

🇩🇪 Merkel makes historyAngela Merkel is sworn in as Germany’s first female chancellor and first from the former East. A grand coalition deal ends the election deadlock. Quiet power beats loud politics.🎈 Candy meets physics<...

🧬 The man who (maybe) cured HIV Before ‘manifesting’ was a TikTok buzzword, Andrew Stimpson from London apparently manifested the impossible — curing himself of HIV. After testing positive in 2002, he shocked doctors three y...

Rewind to 6 November 2005 to 12 November 2005🌠 Fireballs or flying saucers Europe looks up, panics, phones the cops. Slow, glowing Taurids put on a show that screams UFO vibes then science says “comet crumbs, babes.”

🎧 Rewind to 30 October – 5 November 2005🎃 The great pumpkin arms race New England’s finest farmers flexed their green thumbs at the Topsfield Fair, where a 1,314-lb orange beast stole the show. People clapped. Kids sque...

Rewind to 23–30 October 2005 🎸💀 The King still reigns Elvis may have left the building, but he sure didn’t leave the bank. Forbes crowned him the top-earning dead celebrity — again — raking in a cool US$45 million thank...

Rewind to 16 October 2005 to 22 October 2005🕋 Million Man March 2.0 Louis Farrakhan’s Millions More rally hits D.C., calling for unity and self-reliance after Katrina. His fire-and-brimstone speech slams Bush b...

Rewind to 9 October 2005 to 15 October 2005🚀 China goes full space cowboy China’s Shenzhou 6 mission blasts off, sending two taikonauts into orbit for nearly five days — a major flex in the global space race. It’s their...

🧑‍⚖️ Supreme Court Soap Harriet Miers is tapped to replace Sandra Day O’Connor and America collectively Googles “Who?” A loyal Bush insider with zero judicial experience tries to sell a “practicing lawyer’s perspective.” Conservative...

Rewind to 25 September to 1 October 2005 — when emo kids were discovering top hats, Fergie was making “lady lumps” a phrase and Bali gets hit by bombings again.🪖 Abu Ghraib’s dark shadow Lynndie England was found guilty...

Rewind to 18–24 September 2005🌪️ Rita raises hell Just three weeks after Katrina, Hurricane Rita stormed in as a Category 5 beast before slamming Texas and Louisiana as a Category 3. The real nightmare? The evacuation. ...

Rewind to 11–18 September 2005⚡ Lights out in LAMillions of Angelenos suddenly found themselves trapped in elevators, stuck at dead traffic lights, and clutching their Nokia flip phones as a worker’s “oopsie” cut the...