2013 History, Facts, and Trivia

Quick Facts from 2013

• The Mis-heard Event: Philadelphia public schools went on lockdown after a teacher misheard The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song lyrics as “shooting some people outside of school” instead of “shooting some b-ball outside of school.” The school district confirmed the incident was real.
• Top Song: Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke featuring T.I. and Pharrell, which spent 12 consecutive weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and was also one of the most controversial songs of the decade
• Must-See Movies: Gravity, Frozen, 12 Years a Slave, The Great Gatsby, Saving Mr. Banks, Captain Phillips, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
• People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive: Adam Levine
• Notable Books: American Sniper by Chris Kyle and Happy, Happy, Happy by Phil Robertson
• Lipton tea bags (100-count): $3.99; movie ticket: $8.00; extra-large eggs (dozen): $2.40
• The Funny Co-Hosts: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler at the Golden Globes, where they were so good that NBC immediately re-booked them for two more years
• Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Snake, associated with wisdom, intuition, and a quiet talent for sensing things others miss
• The Conversation: Did you see Miley at the VMAs? And have you started Breaking Bad yet?

Top Ten Baby Names of 2013

Girls: Isabella, Sophia, Emma, Olivia, Ava Boys: Jacob, Ethan, Michael, Jayden, William

Fashion Icons and Sex Symbols

Malin Ackerman, Amy Adams, Alessandra Ambrosio, Gillian Anderson, Jennifer Aniston, Hayley Atwell, Morena Baccarin, Kristen Bell, Ashley Benson, Julie Benz, Beyonce, Alison Brie, Gisele Bundchen, Emilia Clarke, Lauren Cohan, Jenna-Louise Coleman, Kaley Cuoco, Miley Cyrus, Alexandra Daddario, Brooklyn Decker, Kat Dennings, Zooey Deschanel, Natalie Dormer, Jenna Fischer, Isla Fisher, Megan Fox, Karen Gillan, Selena Gomez, Ellie Goulding, Maggie Grace, Ariana Grande, Christina Hendricks, Amber Heard, Katie Holmes, Carly Rae Jepsen, Scarlett Johansson, Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashian, Jana Kramer, Mila Kunis, Jennifer Lawrence, Blake Lively, Demi Lovato, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Lupita Nyong’o, Rooney Mara, Tatiana Maslany, Lea Michele, Aly Michalka, Kate Middleton, Janelle Monae, Alex Morgan, Olivia Munn, Rachel Nichols, Michelle Obama, Rita Ora, Cote de Pablo, Katy Perry, Bar Refaeli, Rihanna, Margot Robbie, Emmy Rossum, Zoe Saldana, Shakira, Cobie Smulders, Emma Stone, Taylor Swift, Sophie Turner, Kate Upton, Sofia Vergara, Emma Watson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Kristen Wiig, Olivia Wilde, Michelle Williams

The Quotes

“What am I going to do… sue him for using a picture of me dressed up like him? That’s checkmate right there.” — Dave Chappelle, on Prince using an image of Chappelle dressed as Prince on the cover of his 2013 single Breakfast Can Wait

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year

Pope Francis — recognized for transforming the public face of the Catholic Church within months of his election, projecting humility, accessibility, and a concern for the poor that his predecessor had not

Miss America

Mallory Hagan, Brooklyn, NY

We Lost in 2013

Roger Ebert,  America’s most celebrated film critic, who had written about movies for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967 and won the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a film critic, died April 4, 2013, at age 70, from cancer. He had continued reviewing films and writing his blog even after cancer removed his ability to speak in 2006. His website and written voice remained active until two days before his death.

Nelson Mandela,  the anti-apartheid revolutionary, the first democratically elected president of South Africa, and one of the most admired figures of the 20th century, died December 5, 2013, at age 95, at his home in Johannesburg. Memorial services were attended by more heads of state than any other event in modern history. The sign language interpreter hired for the memorial was widely noted as having made up signs rather than translating.

James Gandolfini, actor best known as Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, died June 19, 2013, at age 51, of a heart attack in Rome.

Lou Reed, rock musician and co-founder of the Velvet Underground, died October 27, 2013, at age 71.

America in 2013 — The Context

Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term on January 21, 2013. The Affordable Care Act was entering its implementation phase, and its central online component — Healthcare.gov — collapsed spectacularly on launch day under relatively light traffic, producing errors and failures that made enrollment nearly impossible for weeks. The website’s troubled rollout dominated domestic political news through the fall.

Internationally, the NSA surveillance revelations leaked by Edward Snowden consumed the summer, revealing that the U.S. government had collected millions of phone records, monitored internet communications, and tapped the phones of allied foreign leaders. The revelations produced lasting damage to relationships with Germany, Brazil, and other allies. Snowden was charged with espionage, fled to Russia, and received asylum there.

The year’s defining domestic tragedy was the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Its defining international tragedy was Typhoon Haiyan in November, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded.

The Boston Marathon Bombing

On April 15, 2013, two bombs built from pressure cookers packed with nails and ball bearings detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed — Krystle Campbell, Lingzi Lu, and eight-year-old Martin Richard — and 264 others were injured, 16 of them losing limbs. The bombers, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were identified from surveillance footage and pursued by law enforcement four days later. Tamerlan was killed during the manhunt. Dzhokhar was captured in Watertown, Massachusetts, hiding in a boat. He was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to death.

The city of Boston’s response to the bombing — defiant, unified, organized around the phrase “Boston Strong” — became a model for how a community absorbs and responds to an act of mass terror.

The Snowden Revelations

On June 6, 2013, the Guardian and Washington Post published the first stories based on classified documents provided by Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old NSA contractor who had copied thousands of documents and passed them to journalists before flying to Hong Kong. The documents revealed that the NSA was collecting metadata on virtually every phone call made in the United States, running a program called PRISM that collected internet data from major tech companies, and conducting extensive surveillance of foreign leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The revelations forced a national conversation about the balance between security and privacy that had been largely avoided since the post-9/11 expansion of surveillance powers. They also damaged U.S. relationships with allies who had been monitored without their knowledge. Snowden was charged under the Espionage Act, accepted asylum in Russia, and has remained there since.

Pope Benedict Resigns

On February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation in Latin at a meeting of Vatican cardinals — the first papal resignation since Gregory XII in 1415. Italian wire service reporter Giovanna Chirri was the only journalist in the room who understood Latin and broke the story immediately; most other reporters waited for official translations. Benedict cited his advanced age and declining strength. Pope Francis was elected on March 13 and immediately established himself as a different kind of pontiff — riding public buses, washing prisoners’ feet, and speaking candidly about poverty and institutional corruption.

Pop Culture Facts and History

Breaking Bad aired its series finale on September 29, 2013, watched by 10.3 million people — more than four times its typical viewership from earlier seasons. The finale brought Walter White’s story to a conclusion that satisfied critics and fans almost equally, which rarely happens. The show’s five-season run had produced what many television critics considered the greatest single narrative arc in television history. The phrase “I am the one who knocks” entered the permanent American cultural vocabulary.

Game of Thrones Season 3, Episode 9, “The Rains of Castamere,” known as the Red Wedding, aired June 2, 2013. Fans who had not read the books were unprepared. The internet’s real-time reaction to the deaths of Robb Stark, his wife, his mother, and most of his bannermen became one of the most documented audience-response moments in television history. The episode demonstrated that Game of Thrones was operating by different rules than most television dramas.

Frozen was released on November 27, 2013, and Let It Go had become omnipresent before the year was out. The film was loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time at the time of its release. Parents who took their children to see it in November were still hearing Let It Go in March.

Beyoncé released a surprise self-titled album on December 13, 2013, with no advance promotion, no single, and no warning, uploading it directly to iTunes at midnight, featuring 14 songs and 17 music videos. The album sold 828,773 copies in the first three days through digital download alone. The surprise drop fundamentally changed how major artists approached album releases, making the absence of a rollout campaign itself a marketing strategy.

Miley Cyrus performed at the MTV Video Music Awards on August 25, 2013, in a performance involving a foam finger, a Robin Thicke duet, and a considerable amount of twerking that demonstrated, conclusively, that she was no longer the Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana. The performance was the most discussed entertainment event of the year. Justin Timberlake’s VMA performance that same evening, in which he received the Video Vanguard Award and briefly reunited with NSYNC, was arguably stronger technically but received less coverage.

Lorde, a 16-year-old from New Zealand born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, released Royals in 2013. The song spent nine weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy for Song of the Year in 2014. Its critique of materialism and luxury-rap tropes, from the perspective of a teenager who had never experienced either, was considered by critics who appreciated that kind of thing the most precisely articulated pop song of the year.

What Does the Fox Say? by the Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis was released September 3, 2013, as a joke, crossed 100 million YouTube views within weeks, and lodged itself in the brain of anyone within earshot. It asked the question “What does the fox say?” and then answered it with a series of nonsense syllables. This was the entire premise. It worked.

Flappy Bird was released on the iOS App Store on May 24, 2013, by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen. The game required tapping to keep a small bird airborne between pipes, had a difficulty curve that produced immediate rage and immediate retry, and became the most downloaded app in the world by January 2014. On February 9, 2014, Nguyen removed it from the App Store, stating that it was “too addictive” and had ruined his simple life. Phones with Flappy Bird still installed were immediately listed on eBay for thousands of dollars.

The Harlem Shake was a video meme that swept the internet in February 2013. The format was consistent: one person dances alone in a room of people going about their normal activities, then the beat drops and suddenly everyone is dancing in costumes or absurd scenarios. Thousands of variations were made by schools, sports teams, military units, and offices worldwide. It peaked and vanished within approximately three weeks, which is roughly the appropriate lifespan for a meme of this type.

The Doge meme, a Shiba Inu dog photographed with a mild-surprise expression and surrounded by multicolored Comic Sans text expressing internal monologue in broken English (“such wow,” “very amaze,” “much excite”), became one of the most recognizable internet memes of the year. It later inspired Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency created as a joke in December 2013 that eventually reached a market capitalization of billions.

Vine launched for iOS on January 24, 2013, introducing the six-second looping video format. It produced its own wave of creators, comedians, and cultural phenomena, built careers for people who had no other platform, and was shut down by Twitter in 2016. The comedic sensibility it developed — fast-cut, surreal, maximally dense — influenced short video format for the rest of the decade.

Orange Is the New Black premiered on Netflix on July 11, 2013, becoming one of the first major Netflix original dramas to achieve widespread critical and popular success. It featured the largest female ensemble cast in television history and was one of the first major productions to cast transgender characters in substantial roles.

House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood, launched February 1, 2013, as Netflix’s first major original drama. Netflix released the entire first season simultaneously — the first major streaming service to use that model for a prestige drama. The phrase “binge-watching” entered everyday vocabulary around the same time.

Edward Snowden’s documents included a slide from an NSA presentation referring to its surveillance capabilities as “collection.” The NSA had collected metadata on 97 billion phone calls and 124 billion internet records in a single month. The scale of the collection was larger than most people had imagined was technically possible.

Xbox One was announced May 21, 2013, by Microsoft. Sony had launched the PlayStation 4 on November 15, 2013, selling one million units on its first day. The competing announcements and initial consumer reactions — which generally favored Sony’s approach — dominated discussion in gaming culture throughout the fall.

Twitter went public on November 7, 2013, raising approximately $2.1 billion in one of the year’s most anticipated technology IPOs. The stock opened at $26 per share and closed at $44.90 on its first day of trading.

Yahoo purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion on May 20, 2013. Tumblr had approximately 300 million monthly unique visitors. Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr became a case study in what happens when a traditional web company buys a youth-culture platform and then doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

Batkid saved San Francisco on November 15, 2013, when the Make-A-Wish Foundation organized an elaborate citywide day in which five-year-old leukemia survivor Miles Scott, dressed as Batman, fought crime across the city. Thousands of volunteers participated, including police, firefighters, and city officials. The event became national news and one of the few unambiguously heartwarming viral stories of the year.

Cat Stevens, Hall and Oates, Kiss, Linda Ronstadt, and Nirvana were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2013. Nirvana’s induction brought the surviving members together, raising immediate questions about who would sing. Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear performed with a rotating lineup of female vocalists, including Joan Jett and Lorde.

Lance Armstrong admitted in a January 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey that he had used performance-enhancing drugs throughout all seven of his Tour de France victories. The admission confirmed what cycling observers had alleged for years. Armstrong was stripped of all seven titles. The admission was considered remarkable primarily because he had spent years aggressively threatening and suing anyone who made the same allegations.

Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprint runner who had become a global symbol of athletic achievement after competing in both the Paralympic and Olympic Games on prosthetic blades, was charged with the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day 2013. He claimed he shot her accidentally through a bathroom door, believing she was an intruder. The trial was broadcast globally.

Eminem released Rap God in October 2013 and set the Guinness World Record for most words in a hit single — 1,560 words in 6 minutes and 4 seconds, averaging 4.28 words per second. A 6-second stretch in the middle reached 9.6 words per second. The record has since been broken by Eminem himself.

The Terrible

The Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013, killed three people and injured 264, with 16 losing limbs. It was the first successful terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11.

Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines on November 8, 2013, with sustained winds of over 195 miles per hour — among the strongest ever recorded at landfall. More than 6,000 people were killed and over three million were displaced. The city of Tacloban was devastated. The storm generated the largest international humanitarian response in Philippine history.

Nobel Prize Winners

Physics — François Englert and Peter Higgs, for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles; the Higgs boson, whose existence their 1964 papers predicted, was confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in July 2012
Chemistry — Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems
Medicine — James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman, and Thomas C. Südhof for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells
Literature — Alice Munro, a Canadian short story writer, for her mastery of the contemporary short story; she subsequently announced her retirement from writing
Peace — Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),  for extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons, recognized in the context of their role in the Syrian civil war
Economics — Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert J. Shiller for their empirical analysis of asset prices

Broadway in 2013

Kinky Boots opened April 4, 2013, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, with music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper. It won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The show followed a shoe factory owner who teams with a drag performer to save the business by manufacturing boots for drag performers. It was adapted from a 2005 British film.

Matilda the Musical opened on April 11, 2013, at the Shubert Theatre, transferred from the West End, where it had opened in 2011. It ran until January 1, 2017, winning four Tony Awards.

Best Film Oscar Winner

Argo, directed by Ben Affleck and starring Affleck as a CIA operative who extracted six American diplomats from revolutionary Iran in 1979 by posing as a film crew scouting locations, won Best Picture at the 85th Academy Awards in February 2013, presented for the 2012 film year. Affleck was not nominated for Best Director — an omission widely noted — but the film won anyway.

2013 Entries to the National Film Registry

Bless Their Little Hearts (1984)
Brandy in the Wilderness (1969)
Cicero March (1966)
Daughter of Dawn (1920)
Decasia (2002)
Ella Cinders (1926)
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Gilda (1946)
The Hole (1963)
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
King of Jazz (1930)
The Lunch Date (1989)
The Magnificent Seven (1961)
Martha Graham Dance Films (various)
Mary Poppins (1964)
Men and Dust (1940)
Midnight (1939)
Notes on the Port of St. Francis (1951)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Quiet Man (1952)
The Right Stuff (1983)
Roger & Me (1989)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Wild Boys of the Road (1933)

Top Movies of 2013

1. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
2. Iron Man 3
3. Frozen
4. Despicable Me 2
5. Man of Steel
6. Gravity
7. Monsters University
8. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
9. Fast and Furious 6
10. Oz the Great and Powerful

Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, was technically the most ambitious film of the year — a 91-minute near-real-time survival drama set in orbit that required new filmmaking techniques for virtually every shot. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Director. Bullock was onscreen for most of the film’s running time, almost entirely alone. The opening shot lasted 12 minutes without a cut.

Most Popular TV Shows of 2013

The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, The Walking Dead, Person of Interest, Dancing with the Stars, Grey’s Anatomy, The Voice, Modern Family, Castle, and Game of Thrones dominated 2013. The year also saw Breaking Bad end its run with record-setting viewership, and Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards establish Netflix as a serious producer of dramatic content.

Sports Champions of 2013

World Series: Boston Red Sox defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 4-2; the Red Sox, who had finished last in the AL East in 2012, went wire-to-wire in first place and won the championship with a team that had grown beards as a form of group solidarity after the Boston Marathon bombing; third baseman David Ortiz was named World Series MVP
Super Bowl XLVIII: Seattle Seahawks defeated the Denver Broncos 43-8 on February 2, 2014, in the most lopsided Super Bowl outcome to that point; the game was effectively over by halftime
NBA Champions: Miami Heat defeated the San Antonio Spurs 4-3 in one of the most celebrated Finals series of the era; the series went seven games and produced some of the most analyzed individual performances of LeBron James’s career
Stanley Cup: Chicago Blackhawks defeated the Boston Bruins 4-2
U.S. Open Golf: Justin Rose
U.S. Open Tennis: Men/Women: Rafael Nadal / Serena Williams
Wimbledon: Men/Women: Andy Murray / Marion Bartoli; Murray became the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936
NCAA Football Champions: North Dakota State (FCS division)
NCAA Basketball Champions: Louisville — subsequently vacated due to an NCAA rules violation
Kentucky Derby: Orb

Sports Highlight: Andy Murray’s Wimbledon win ended a 77-year drought for British men’s singles at the tournament, producing scenes of national celebration in the UK comparable to a major sporting championship. The Boston Red Sox’s championship was the most emotionally resonant of the year — a team that had started the season in the shadow of the marathon bombing, grew beards as a team solidarity gesture, and won the title at Fenway Park for the first time since 1918.

FAQs:  2013 History, Facts, and Trivia

Q: What was the Boston Marathon bombing?
A: On April 15, 2013, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev detonated two pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 264. Tamerlan was killed during the subsequent manhunt; Dzhokhar was captured and later sentenced to death.

Q: What did Edward Snowden reveal in 2013?
A: Documents leaked by NSA contractor Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was collecting metadata on virtually all American phone calls, gathering internet data from major tech companies through a program called PRISM, and surveilling foreign leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel. The revelations sparked a national debate about surveillance, privacy, and government overreach.

Q: What was Flappy Bird, and why did it disappear? A:
A simple mobile game created by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen that required tapping to keep a bird airborne between pipes. It became the most downloaded app in the world in early 2014. Nguyen removed it from sale on February 9, 2014, stating it had made his life miserable. Phones with it still installed immediately sold for thousands of dollars on eBay.

Q: What did Beyoncé do in December 2013 that changed music marketing?
A: Released a complete self-titled album — 14 songs and 17 videos — with no advance promotion or announcement, uploaded directly to iTunes at midnight on December 13, 2013. It sold over 828,000 copies in three days. The surprise release became a template that major artists have copied ever since.

Q: What happened at the 2013 VMAs?
A: Miley Cyrus performed with Robin Thicke in a performance widely described as provocative, involving twerking and a foam finger, that dominated cultural conversation for weeks. Justin Timberlake received the Video Vanguard Award and briefly reunited with NSYNC in the same show. Miley got more coverage.

Q: What British tennis milestone happened at Wimbledon 2013?
A: Andy Murray became the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936 — a 77-year drought that had become one of British sports’ most discussed absences.

Q: What TV series ended in 2013?
A: Breaking Bad aired its series finale on September 29, 2013, watched by 10.3 million people. The finale was widely praised. Dexter also ended in 2013, to considerably less praise.

Q: What was the Doge meme, and what did it become?
A: A photo of a Shiba Inu dog with a surprised expression surrounded by Comic Sans text expressing an inner monologue in broken English. It became one of the defining internet memes of 2013 and later inspired Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency created as a joke in December 2013 that eventually achieved a multi-billion dollar market capitalization.