When Mariah Carey‘s fourth studio album and first holiday-themed album Merry Christmas came out in October 1994, it climbed to number three on the Billboard 200, but its standout song, ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’, was not commercially released as a single and it was therefore ineligible for a spot on the Billboard Hot 100. Backed by its festive music video – in which Mariah adorns furry sweaters, woolly hats, and a form-fitting elf costume, placing baubles on a Christmas tree and frolicking with Santa Claus and reindeer in the snow – the song went on to reach number one in a host of countries, including Canada, Australia, Germany, and France, and with an estimated sixteen million copies sold, it stands as the best-selling Christmas single by a female artist and one of the best-selling singles of all time. But in the United States, chart rules meant that it was always regarded as a recurrent single, and its surge up the Billboard Hot 100 only began several years ago, when like a pair of festive trousers these rules were inevitably stretched and relaxed.
In 2017, ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100, providing Carey with her first top-ten single in the United States of the decade, and with her 28th top-ten single in the United States overall. Last Christmas, the song reached the loftier peak of number three. Now twenty-five years after its first appearance – and following a concerted campaign of social media posts, live performances, and behind-the-scenes footage including outtakes from the original video filmed all the way back in 1993 – ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ has finally reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, its bell-chimes and synthesizers heralding the season and slinking their way to top spot just in time for the turn of the year. For the week ending 21 December, the song claimed 27,000 digital sales and 45.6 million streams.
As a result, Mariah now boasts a whole slew of additional records. Twenty-five years in the making, the song’s climb to number one has been the longest in pop history, and the slowest in more discrete terms after thirty-five cumulative weeks in the chart. Carey can also now claim the longest span of Billboard Hot 100 number ones: 29 years, four months, and two weeks stretching back to her 4 August, 1990 debut ‘Vision of Love’, a record which surpasses the 27 years and five months between Cher’s ‘Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves’ (1971) and ‘Believe’ (1999).
In her 80th overall week at number one, Carey also extends her record for the most number one singles among solo artists, with ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ her nineteenth in total, placing her just one behind The Beatles. She joins Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Usher as the only artists with number ones across the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Perhaps most remarkably, ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ is the first Christmas song to claim the top spot since ‘The Chipmunk Song’ reigned supreme more than sixty years ago. Commemorating the achievement as well as a new deluxe anniversary edition of Merry Christmas, Carey released a new video for the song entitled ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You (Make My Wish Come True Edition)’, directed by Joseph Kahn.
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On Monday Night Football, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees scrambled past Tom Brady and stiff-armed Peyton Manning out of the way to claim the NFL record for most career touchdown passes. Two-time Super Bowl winner and fourteen-time Pro Bowl selection Manning retired after the 2015 season with 539 touchdown passes to his name. Brees and Brady, now both in their forties, headed into the 2019 season as starting quarterbacks respectively for the Saints and the New England Patriots, with every chance of surpassing Manning’s record. But a thumb injury which sidelined Brees for five games and the Patriots’ lacklustre offense have hampered their progress, clipping their wings and making everything tight.
Brady had the first opportunity to soar past Manning over the weekend, as on Sunday the Patriots faced the struggling Cincinnati Bengals, but though the Patriots won the game 13-34 Brady was limited to two touchdown passes, leaving him still one behind Manning’s record of 539. Brees in turn stood on 537 career touchdown passes as the Saints steadied themselves to host the Indianapolis Colts at the Superdome. In prime time, Brees did not disappoint: after a quiet first quarter, a 15-yard arrow to the Saints’ outstanding receiver Michael Thomas early in the second saw him draw level with Brady, and a 21-yard toss to Tre’Quan Smith six minutes later brought him level with Manning, the record now well within grasp.
Brees thought he had the record all sewn up before halftime, but a touchdown with seven seconds of the half remaining was ruled out for pass interference, the celebrations of Saints fans cruelly cut short, giving rise to just a modicum of tension. It was never in doubt: a short five-yard pass to backup tight end Josh Hill on the first drive of the third quarter saw Brees move to 540 career touchdown passes, as he stretched beyond Manning to set a new record. He added a fourth touchdown pass of the night and his 541st in total with a 28-yard toss to Taysom Hill late in the third quarter. A successful night for the Saints was driven by Brees’s accuracy, as he also finished the game with 29-of-30 passes, a 96.7 completion percentage which broke the NFL single-game record set by Philip Rivers last season. These two records add to Brees’s already stellar list of accomplishments, which includes the record he set last year for career passing yards. With both the Saints and the Patriots heading for the playoffs, the title for most career touchdown passes could change hands over the remainder of the season.
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The ancient human species Homo erectus emerged around 1.9 million years ago. Considered a direct ancestor of several species of humans, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the anatomically modern humans which exist today, Homo erectus was the founding hominin species of Maritime Southeast Asia, leading the early expansion of hominins out of Africa as they moved across Asia and crossed into Java, in modern-day Indonesia, via land bridges approximately 1.6 million years ago. The type specimen for Homo erectus remains Java Man, the oldest hominin fossil ever found when it was discovered by an excavation team led by Eugène Dubois on the banks of the Solo River in East Java between 1891 and 1892: with its proportions similar to modern humans and its relatively large skullcap, Dubois named his find Pithecanthropus erectus based on the belief that this ancient human species was the first to walk fully upright.
Several decades later, in the 1930s, a Dutch excavation team led by Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald uncovered twelve skullcaps (calvaria) and two lower leg bones (tibiae) which were later attributed to Homo erectus, about twenty metres north of the Solo River in the East Javan town of Ngandong. Scientists have long debated the age of these fossils without reaching a consensus, with estimates ranging roughly from 550,000 to 100,000 years old. Now a new study which used comprehensive radiometric dating to evaluate the surrounding landscape, whose findings were published this week in the journal Nature, has indicated that the Ngandong bones were buried in a relatively narrow span of time between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago.
That solidifies the sense of the Ngandong fossils as belonging to an especially young and anatomically and culturally advanced form of Homo erectus. The species is not thought to have lived beyond 100,000 years ago, suggesting that Homo erectus made its final stand on Java before a changing climate and the spread of rainforest flora left the species unable to adapt. When modern humans arrived on Java approximately 40,000 years ago, Homo erectus had long been extinct. The dating of the fossils nevertheless implies that Homo erectus endured for an astonishing 1.8 million years, five times longer than our own species, making Homo erectus by far the longest surviving human ancestor. It also raises the possibility that the species may have mingled with Denisovans, contributing just a smidgen to modern Southeast Asian DNA.
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The 1964 Summer Olympics was an event of firsts. Held in Tokyo, Japan, this was the first time the Olympics had been held in Japan, after the scheduled 1940 Summer Olympics were first moved to Helsinki before being abandoned altogether owing to the onset of World War II; it was the first time the Olympics had been hosted in Asia; and the first Olympics with colour telecasts, broadcast internationally via satellites without the need for tapes to be flown overseas. At the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, South Africa was banned from competing for the first time as the international community began to turn against its system of apartheid. In track and field, the women’s pentathlon made its Olympic debut. Joe Frazier won gold in heavyweight boxing despite competing with a broken thumb, and the Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina won two golds, a silver, and two bronze medals at what was her third Olympics, taking her to eighteen Olympic medals in total, a record that stood for 48 years until it was surpassed in 2012 by American swimmer Michael Phelps.
For the 1964 Summer Olympics, Tokyo got a new high-speed bullet train, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen which runs between Tokyo and Shin-Ōsaka, but the stadium which hosted the opening and closing ceremonies as well as the track and field competition had already been made. The National Stadium in Tokyo, with a capacity of 48,000, had been completed in 1948 in time for that year’s Asian Games. It continued to serve as the home of Japanese football, but part of Japan’s winning bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics entailed the destruction of the old National Stadium, and a ¥100 billion Zaha Hadid-designed renovation effectively putting a new stadium in its place. As costs mounted, eventually rising to an estimated ¥252 billion, Hadid’s design was scrapped and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzō Abe handed the project to the local architect Kengo Kuma, with the budget capped at around ¥150 million.
As part of the kerfuffle, the new National Stadium proved unable to host the 2019 Rugby World Cup. But now – eight months ahead of next summer’s Olympics, and after a slew of last-minute adjustments, including to the height of toilet seats and elevator braille – the National Stadium is up and ready for the action to commence. The 68,000-seat, woodland-themed structure, replete with green spaces and envisioned as a ‘living tree’, will host the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2020 Summer Olympics, as well as football matches and track and field events. It was formally unveiled at a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Abe last Sunday, before a more celebratory inauguration this weekend saw Usain Bolt headline amid an array of sport, music, and culture, as he took to the track to run a brief ring-wielding 200 metres.
