Every day, Wikipedia publishes which of its articles people read most.
Stack four months of those lists together and you get a rough public
record of what the world paid attention to.
Each coloured band below is one article. The thicker the band, the
more people were reading it that day.
What to look for: a band that balloons out of nowhere is a news
event. How quickly it shrinks again is how fast everyone moved on — and
that is usually faster than you would guess.