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The past decade was filled with so many unexpected turning points: moments big and small that we now understand to be truly important. These events ignited real change, warned of a not-so-far-off future, or had surprising effects that we couldn’t have imagined at the time.

We started thinking about this particular time period because Vox just happened to turn 10 this year, but 2014 saw much more than the birth of our news organization.

It was an incredibly divisive year kicking off an incredibly divisive decade. This was the year the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner mainstreamed the Black Lives Matter movement; this was also the year of Gamergate, a harassment campaign that became entwined with the ascendant alt-right. It was a wildly online year, too, that set all sorts of attitudes and behaviors in motion (see: BLM and Gamergate, but also The Fappening and Kim Kardashian’s special brand of virality).

Our reporters set out to explain the last 10 years of indelible moments — the good, the bad, the fascinating — in a series of pieces you can find across the site.  Here’s a little taste of two of them.

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Since Donald Trump eked out an electoral college victory in 2016 and reshaped the GOP, journalists, academics, and politicians have been trying to explain what, exactly, happened. One prevailing narrative is that Trump spoke directly to a forgotten voting bloc — poor and working-class white people, especially those living in rural America.

There’s a kernel of truth in that theory; Trump did indeed outperform previous Republican candidates among that demographic. But the stereotype of the average Trump voter that’s been born out of that narrative — the blue-collar union worker who hasn’t seen a meaningful raise in decades — is misleading at best. In fact, 2016 taught us there is no universal definition of what constitutes a “working-class” voter and that class solidarity is still deeply misunderstood.

As it turns out, Trump’s biggest, most reliable voting block wasn’t the downtrodden white worker; it was largely white people from middle- and high-income households. When voters were divided up by income in various exit polls, Trump was only able to beat Joe Biden in one of three tiers: those making over $100,000 a year. 

Trump’s win wasn’t a high-water mark for the role of class in elections like many thought, but rather for the media focus on the role of class in elections. Even still, we haven’t really figured out how to measure our class divides or even talk about them.

This lack of clarity has underscored a big problem in American politics: We have categories that are used as proxies for class — like someone’s college education level or union membership status — but they are imprecise substitutes that blur the bigger picture of the US electorate.  

Trump’s victory may have turned people’s attention to class politics, but there’s still a long way to go before Americans get a clearer picture of how class will shape, or even determine, the election in November — and those in the years to come.

—Abdallah Fayyad 

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It’s been trendy lately to talk about how differently we now treat women, particularly famous women, than we did in the aughts. We talk about how today, we understand that it was wrong for tabloids to harass Britney Spears and publish all those upskirt photos and ask teen pop stars on live TV if their boobs were real. 

There’s a specific moment, though, when we saw that much-remarked-upon evolution tip into reality, the purity culture of the 2000s coming up against the feminist outrage of the 2010s and crumbling. 

The grossly named Fappening occurred on August 31, 2014, when one hacker’s stash of nearly 500 celebrity nudes (including Jennifer Lawrence, then at the height of her fame) leaked out to the mainstream internet. The previous decade had a playbook in place for talking about leaked photos of naked stars. You talked about them as something titillating for you, the viewer, to look at without apology, and something shameful for the woman (it was always a woman) pictured to apologize for. 

For some media outlets, it seemed only natural to continue the playbook of the 2000s into 2014. “#JenniferLawrence phone was hacked her #nude pics leaked Check them out in all their gloriousness,” tweeted Perez Hilton, publicizing a post that reproduced the uncensored pictures of Lawrence. 

But instead of getting the traffic windfall he might have expected, Perez was slammed with outrage across social media. He had to apologize for his post and replace it with a censored version.

As Hilton and his cohort scrambled to catch up, the rest of the media was allying itself fiercely on the side of the hacking victims, denouncing anyone who looked at the leaked nudes.

It’s hard to say exactly what swung the discourse quite so hard against the hackers this time around. Perhaps it was the ubiquity of camera phones, which had made nudes so inescapable: that feeling that it could happen to you. Perhaps it was because the media at the time was obsessed with Jennifer Lawrence, like everyone else was, and they wanted to be on her side. Perhaps the collective hive mind had just decided the time had come for feminism to trend upward.

Whatever the reason, the press had now established a new narrative it could use to talk about sex crimes in the social media era, especially sex crimes that involved famous and beloved actresses. Three years later, it would put that knowledge to use to break a series of stories about Harvey Weinstein as the decade-old Me Too movement re-energized itself.

Me Too saw reputational losses and criminal charges wielded against powerful men who for decades had been able to get away with sexual violence with impunity. It was able to do that because of what we all learned from The Fappening.

—Constance Grady

Read the rest of the package here.

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Vox's Joshua Keating digs in. Read more »

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Today's edition was produced and edited by Caroline Houck. We'll see you tomorrow!

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