Saturday, June 20

The air in the Bonn Bundestag chamber was thick with cigarette smoke and history. On June 20, 1991, after eleven hours of debate, parliamentarians cast a paper ballot. The tally was close: 338 for Berlin, 320 for Bonn. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s governing coalition had fractured on the issue. The vote was not a simple administrative decision. It was a choice between two versions of Germany. Bonn represented the post-war Federal Republic, a modest Rhineland city synonymous with democracy and Western integration. Berlin was a sprawling, incomplete symbol of a united nation, still scarred by its twentieth-century divisions.

The debate centered on cost, symbolism, and political psychology. Pro-Bonn delegates argued for the stability and ‘Rhinish’ moderation their city embodied. Pro-Berlin voices, like novelist and SPD member Stefan Heym, spoke of the city’s historical weight and its position in the geographic heart of a new Europe. The vote mattered because it forced a physical reckoning with reunification. Moving the government was a multi-billion-deutschmark promise to the former East, a tangible investment in the idea of a single nation.

The move was often misunderstood as an immediate return to the pre-war capital. It was a slower, more deliberate transplantation. The Bundesrat (upper house) and several ministries remained in Bonn, a concession to the losing side. Berlin did not fully resume its role as capital until 1999. The decision created a government spread across two cities, a permanent architectural reminder of the compromise required to bind east and west.

The impact was both visceral and bureaucratic. It transformed Berlin into a massive construction site for a decade and drained Bonn of its central purpose. It answered a philosophical question with concrete and steel: the new Germany would face its complex history head-on, from a capital that had been both the heart of an empire and a city divided by a wall.

Universal Pictures released *Jaws* on a Friday. The studio spent $1.8 million on television advertising alone, a saturation campaign targeting prime time. The film opened on 464 screens, a wide release by the standards of an era when major pictures still opened in a few key cities and expanded slowly. The decision was born of necessity. The film’s production had gone massively over budget, and the studio needed a rapid, national return. This logistical choice, more than the film’s content, created the template for the summer blockbuster.

What mattered was the scale of the return. *Jaws* earned $7 million in its first weekend. It reached $100 million in 59 days, a record. The film demonstrated that a single movie could dominate the cultural conversation for an entire season, provided it was supported by national marketing and simultaneous availability. It shifted the industry’s calendar, proving summer—once a dumping ground for low-expectation films—could be the most lucrative season. The model prioritized opening weekend grosses over critical reception or long-term theatrical legs.

A persistent misunderstanding is that *Jaws* was the first summer hit. It was not. The innovation was in the coordinated, nationwide release pattern and the marketing budget that supported it. The film itself was a tense thriller with a malfunctioning mechanical shark. The business strategy was the true predator.

The lasting impact is an industry permanently oriented around event films. *Jaws* led directly to the high-stakes, wide-release strategies of *Star Wars* two years later and every tentpole film since. It centralized studio resources around fewer, bigger pictures designed for maximum immediate impact. The film did not just scare audiences; it taught Hollywood how to hunt for revenue.

Elie Wiesel, the conference chairman, received the threat in writing. The Turkish government warned that including the Armenian Genocide on the agenda would endanger Turkey's Jewish community and harm Israeli-Turkish relations. Israel’s foreign ministry pressured the organizers to comply. The conference opened on June 20 as planned. Historian Yehuda Bauer presented a paper titled “The Armenian Genocide as a Precursor of the Holocaust.” The Turkish ambassador to Israel walked out. The event marked the first time a major academic conference explicitly linked the two atrocities, breaking a scholarly and diplomatic taboo.

The confrontation mattered because it forced the issue of comparative genocide into a public, international forum. The Turkish government’s attempt at censorship highlighted the political potency of historical recognition. For many scholars, particularly Holocaust specialists, the conference was a turning point. It challenged the notion of the Holocaust’s uniqueness not to diminish it, but to place it within a broader pattern of state-sponsored mass murder. The act of holding the sessions, despite significant diplomatic and political pressure, asserted academic freedom over state narrative control.

The event is often remembered as a footnote. Its significance lies in the precedent it set. It established a model of defiance that later informed scholarship and activism around other denied genocides. The conference created a bridge between Jewish and Armenian academic communities that had previously existed in parallel.

The impact was intellectual and political. It helped legitimize the study of the Armenian Genocide within Western academia, moving it from the realm of ethnic advocacy to comparative historical analysis. The conference demonstrated that the study of genocide is inherently political, and that recognizing one atrocity does not require the silencing of another.

From the Palomar Observatory in California, astronomers David H. Levy and Henry Holt recorded a faint point of light moving against the fixed stars. They designated it 1990 MB. Further calculation revealed its path was not within the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This object, later named Eureka, occupied a gravitational sweet spot in Mars’s orbit, a Lagrange point known as L5. It was the first confirmed Martian Trojan, a companion sharing the planet’s journey around the Sun, forever leading it by about 60 degrees.

The discovery mattered because it proved a theoretical population existed. Jupiter was known to have thousands of Trojan asteroids. Finding one for Mars suggested the architecture of Lagrange points was not unique to giant planets. Eureka’s orbit is remarkably stable over millions of years, a fossil from the early solar system. Its composition, later determined to be primarily the volcanic rock aubrite, suggests it may be a piece of primordial Martian mantle or crust, ejected during the planet’s violent formative period and captured in its orbital niche.

Eureka is not merely a rock near Mars. It is locked in a precise celestial dance, a testament to orbital mechanics. Its discovery opened a new category of solar system object. Since 1990, at least eight other Martian Trojans have been identified, with Eureka remaining the largest known member of this small clan.

The impact is one of pure celestial cartography. Eureka and its siblings are natural probes of solar system dynamics and planetary formation. They are test particles that reveal the gravitational history of the inner solar system. Their existence shows that even a relatively small planet like Mars can shepherd its own ancient entourage, a ghostly retinue trailing and leading it through the void.