Last year we had a pandemic. 2021 saw an insurrection — and a pandemic.

Your handy guide to what the hell happened this year.

Did you just wake up and realize that the year is over? We’re here to remind you of what happened.

It’s tough to look back on a whole year of news, reviews, opinions, rants and raves and find out what you, the readers, seemed to like best. So instead of assigning the thankless task to some starry-eyed intern, we programmed an ultra-fast mainframe computer at DCist HQ to scour the year’s content for the posts that were widely read, commented, tweeted and liked. Here’s what it found.

Given the fact that the District had four active breweries prior to prohibition (one where the Kennedy Center currently stands), the current state of beer affairs in our fair city could be seen as a glass that’s half-empty. But with the opening of the city’s first new breweries in fifty years coming in 2011, we’d rather look at it as a glass that’s half-full — and likely to keep filling in years to come.

In the closing months of 2011, Occupy D.C. made a lot of noise, but whether they’ve made an impact is still to be determined.

A look back at a busy year in the D.C. food scene, along with some of the staff’s favorite dishes they ate in 2011.

It was a rough year for government support of the arts in 2011. Federal and local governments scaled back their funding, in some cases forcing cultural institutions to make significant programming cuts.

While we’ve previously focused our year-end efforts on recapping what shows we’ve seen and what local artists we’ve loved, the time honored tradition of choosing albums of the year has eluded us. No more.

Phew! It’s been quite the year, huh? In this periodic end-of-the-year series, we look at the people and places that made 2011 what it was. In this installment, it’s Sulaimon Brown.