In the first week of January 2020, the United States and Iran were on the brink of war. A week later, Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial began. In a normal year, those two events might have been among the defining moments, but this year, it’s hard to even keep track of them amid the chaos that followed. Simply put, 2020 was a year of “news hyperinflation.” The U.S. experienced three of the most consequential events in recent history—COVID-19, the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and the presidential election—in a cascade of overlapping crises. Advertisement Predictably, these three topics dominated Slate’s most popular stories of 2020, as readers sought to make sense of the unprecedented circumstances we all found ourselves in. The stories on this list are prime examples of Slate’s journalistic ethos. They offer a rigorously curious approach to decoding the news, cutting through the noise to explain what really matters.