April 15, 2013

Gas cost $3.53 a gallon in the spring of 2013, and the Dow Jones stood at 16,577 — and the White House was publicly signaling that Syria had likely used chemical weapons, marking a significant escalation in how the U.S. was framing the ongoing civil war there. On the cultural front, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis were dominating radio with "Thrift Shop," while Dan Brown's "Inferno" was sitting at the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list. The Miami Heat won the NBA championship that year by defeating the San Antonio Spurs, and earlier in the spring, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina had been elected the 266th pope, taking the name Francis and becoming the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas, and the first from the Southern Hemisphere.