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Printed from https://www.damninteresting.com/twenty/

In 2005, YouTube, reddit, and Facebook were all still wet and screaming infants. Google, working under the motto “Don’t Be Evil,” had just dethroned Yahoo! as the planet’s most popular Internet search engine (AskJeeves was not available for comment). Nickelback was at the height of its fame. Internet Explorer was the most used web browser, by far. TamagotchiTM Connection was the must-have toy of the season. And in September of that year, a 27-year-old science and history nerd named Alan published Damn Interesting’s first article⁠—Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom. This month is our site’s twentieth birthday.

I have been conflicted about how to observe the occasion. Initially we planned to just leave that note at the top of There Once Was a Man Called Curley⁠—our writers are reluctant to bore everyone with uncompelling self-indulgence. At the same time, a decimally delicious date such as twenty seems plenty important, and the lack of a formal acknowledgement feels like a freshly missing tooth⁠—a disconcerting vacancy that one’s tongue cannot stop probing. So this brief post stands in as something inadequate yet extant, much like Nickelback.

In the years since the first Damn Interesting article, much has changed in the world: Apple’s iPhone touched off the smartphone age; Twitter took flight; Facebook ate the Internet, and excreted something…else; Google released the Chrome web browser; Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin; astronomers downgraded Pluto to a dwarf planet; NASA retired the Space Shuttle; CERN discovered the Higgs Boson with the Large Hadron Collider; North Korea got nukes; Fukushima melted down; Osama Bin Laden was killed; Edward Snowden leaked; Google dropped their motto; Brexit broke Britain; COVID-19 paused the planet; James Webb got his Space Telescope; LIGO detected gravitational waves; astronomers detected our first interstellar visitor ʻOumuamua; we collectively made 1.7 billion new humans, give or take; and so on.

In that time, our small, independent crew of authors, editors, illustrators, and podcasters at Damn Interesting published 797,626 words (798,231 if you count this post), released 410 podcast episodes, curated over 45,000 interesting links, made a few games, won a few awards, published one paper book, served up zero ads, and gained twenty years of, let’s say, experience.

How about you? How have the past twenty years been? What are your aims for the next twenty? What would you like to see Damn Interesting do in the next two decades (apart from “publish more often” [which is impossible unless some of us gain financial freedom from our day jobs])? Should we add discussion to curated links? Make videos based on articles? Another paper book? More games? More short-form curios? A pop-up restaurant? A limited edition, Damn-Interesting-branded LabubuTM?

For posterity, some preposterous predictions for the next twenty years:

  • “AI” grows so powerful that it becomes nearly profitable
  • Astronomers discover Planet X1
  • Linguists discover a word that rhymes with “orange”2
  • The United States formally adopts the metric system3
  • Geneticists engineer convenient boneless chickens4
  • Humans establish a permanent moon base5
  • Vat-grown meat becomes commercially viable6
  • SETI detects a signal of extraterrestrial origin7

We hope you’re all taking care of yourselves in these strange times. Thank you for being here for our vicennial milestone. Superthanks to those who have donated over the years to keep us going. And we do plan to keep on going, we have so many more true stories to tell. Raise a glass if you are inclined to sentimentally elevate wet vessels.

1 Formerly Planet Twitter.
2 “Door hinge” is two words, silly.
3 But officials change unit names to things like “kill-o-meter” and “dear liter.”
4 These creatures are as upsetting as one imagines.
5 Discovering that hairless primates find airless space desert quite dull after a few weeks.
6 “Manwich” takes on troubling implications.
7 They have been trying to reach us about our space station’s extended warranty.

© 2025 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).

Printed from https://www.damninteresting.com/twenty/

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