November 26, 2019

That fall of 2019, gas ran $2.60 a gallon and Trump was in the White House — and the Supreme Court was weighing whether the Civil Rights Act protected LGBT workers from discrimination on the job. On screens and bookshelves, Joaquin Phoenix was drawing massive crowds to "Joker" while Delia Owens held the top fiction spot on the bestseller list with "Where the Crawdads Sing." The Washington Nationals won their first-ever World Series title that October, defeating the Houston Astros in seven games, and just weeks earlier astronomers had announced the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b — the first time water had been found on a planet orbiting within a star's habitable zone.