46 Fun Facts About 2022

Which film won Best Picture in March 2022, the first winner released by a streamer?

CODA follows the hearing daughter of a deaf family, and when Troy Kotsur won for it that night the audience applauded in sign language, waving their hands in the air.

Will Smith slapped which comedian on stage at the 2022 Oscars?

Chris Rock had joked about Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head; within the hour Smith won Best Actor for King Richard, and the Academy later banned him from its events for ten years.

Which actor returned as Iceman in 2022's Top Gun: Maverick?

Val Kilmer had lost his voice to throat cancer, so the few words Iceman speaks to Maverick were made from his own voice, digitally altered to be clear.

Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022 at which residence?

Balmoral Castle is in Scotland, so her death set off Operation Unicorn, the plan for a death north of the border: her coffin rested in Edinburgh before the journey to London.

Argentina's 2022 World Cup win was its first since which star's 1986 team?

Diego Maradona's 1986 side was Argentina's last to win it until Lionel Messi's, which needed a penalty shoot-out after France twice came back in a 3-3 draw.

In 2022, Kylian Mbappé scored the first hat-trick in a men's World Cup final since which England striker in 1966?

Geoff Hurst's three goals won the cup for England; Mbappé's could not save France, though they made him the tournament's top scorer with eight.

Which country became the first African nation to reach a World Cup semi-final in 2022?

Morocco knocked out Spain on penalties and Portugal 1-0 before France stopped them 2-0, going further than any African or Arab team had before.

Why was the 2022 World Cup played in November and December?

To avoid Qatar's extreme heat, where June highs average above 40°C, FIFA moved the tournament out of the summer for the first time, dropping it into the middle of Europe's club season.

Which newspaper bought the viral word game Wordle in January 2022?

The New York Times paid a price in the low seven figures to Josh Wardle, an engineer who had built the game for his partner and named it with a pun on his own surname.

Which team did the Los Angeles Rams beat in Super Bowl LVI in February 2022?

The Cincinnati Bengals led 20-16 until Cooper Kupp's touchdown with 1:25 left; the 23-20 win came in the Rams' own SoFi Stadium, the second year running a team took the title at home.

The 2022 defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was held in which US state?

Virginia got the case because the Washington Post, which ran Heard's 2018 op-ed, has its printing press and web servers in Fairfax County; the jury there found for Depp on June 1.

Which 1985 Kate Bush song topped charts around the world in 2022 after featuring in Stranger Things?

Running Up That Hill stalled at number three in Britain in 1985; its return took it to number one there 37 years after release, at the time the longest wait any single had had.

In Stranger Things 4, what name do the kids give the villain, borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons?

Vecna turns out to be Henry Creel, once the lab's test subject One, whom Eleven herself had banished to the other world years before the kids gave him the name.

Which Beyonce single from Renaissance topped the Hot 100 in 2022?

Break My Soul, a house track built on Robin S.'s "Show Me Love", gave Beyoncé her first solo number one since "Single Ladies" fourteen years earlier.

Which artist became the first to fill the entire top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 in a single week in 2022?

Taylor Swift did it with Midnights, passing the nine places Drake held in 2021; two weeks later the presale for her tour crashed Ticketmaster and led to a Senate hearing.

In Netflix's Wednesday, which school do the Addamses send their daughter to?

Nevermore Academy is her mother's old school, where she is packed off after being expelled for loosing piranhas on the water polo team that bullied her brother.

House of the Dragon, which premiered in August 2022, adapts which 2018 book?

Fire & Blood is written as an in-world history by a maester weighing witnesses who contradict one another, so the show's writers had to decide which version of each event really happened.

Which fantasy author provided the worldbuilding for FromSoftware's Elden Ring?

George R.R. Martin says video games are "not really my thing", but he wrote the world's backstory and history, then handed it to Hidetaka Miyazaki's team to build the game on.

The first full-color image from which space telescope was unveiled at the White House in July 2022?

The James Webb Space Telescope's view of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 covered a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, yet showed thousands of galaxies.

What was the aim of NASA's DART mission to the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in 2022?

Deflection: the spacecraft's crash cut Dimorphos's orbit around its parent asteroid by about 32 minutes, when NASA had set 73 seconds as the bar for success.

Artemis I, which lifted off on November 16, 2022, was the first flight of which NASA rocket?

The Space Launch System flew only after hydrogen leaks and two hurricanes had held it up for months; its uncrewed Orion capsule then looped around the Moon and splashed down on December 11.

Shinzo Abe was assassinated in July 2022 while campaigning in which Japanese city?

Nara is where a man with a homemade gun shot him during a street speech; the suspect said he blamed the Unification Church, to which Abe had ties, for bankrupting his family.

Which UK prime minister's 2022 tenure was outlasted by a tabloid's livestreamed lettuce?

Liz Truss announced her resignation within a week of the Daily Star pointing a camera at the lettuce; her mini-budget of unfunded tax cuts had rattled the markets and her own party.

Which crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2022?

FTX unravelled in nine days: a CoinDesk report on the balance sheet of sister firm Alameda Research set off a run on the exchange, and its founder was convicted of fraud a year later.

Which country topped the medal table at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics?

Norway's 16 golds were the most any nation had won at a single Winter Games, a record that lasted four years, until Norway beat it with a 17th gold in Italy.

Which Encanto song topped the US Hot 100 in early 2022?

We Don't Talk About Bruno did what "Let It Go" never managed, giving a Disney animated film its first Hot 100 number one since "A Whole New World" from Aladdin in 1993.

Which team did the Houston Astros beat in the 2022 World Series?

The Philadelphia Phillies led two games to one, then went hitless in Game 4, only the second no-hitter in World Series history, and Houston won the next two as well.

Who won his first NBA Finals MVP as the Warriors beat the Celtics in 2022?

Stephen Curry had won three titles without ever being named the Finals' best player; this time he scored 34 in the clinching game and took the award by a unanimous vote.

Which team ended the Tampa Bay Lightning's run of two straight Stanley Cups in 2022?

The Colorado Avalanche won in six games, stopping Tampa Bay two wins short of the NHL's first three-peat since the Islanders of the early 1980s.

Serena Williams stepped away from tennis after which 2022 tournament, a break that lasted until 2026?

The US Open was staged as her farewell: she beat the world number two there before losing in the third round, then came back to the tour in 2026, nearly four years later.

Which country won Eurovision 2022 with Kalush Orchestra's "Stefania"?

Ukraine won on a landslide public vote, but the war meant it could not stage the next contest, so runner-up Britain hosted the 2023 edition in Liverpool on its behalf.

Protests erupted across Iran in September 2022 after which woman died in police custody?

Mahsa Amini, 22, had been detained by the morality police over how she wore her hijab; the protests that followed took up a Kurdish slogan, "Woman, Life, Freedom".

Which outlet published the leaked draft of the Dobbs decision in May 2022?

Politico's scoop was an unprecedented leak of a full draft opinion from inside the Supreme Court, and the Court's own investigation ended without naming who had passed it on.

Ketanji Brown Jackson took the Supreme Court seat of which retiring justice in 2022?

Stephen Breyer handed his seat to his own former law clerk: Jackson had worked in his chambers at the turn of the century, and became the first Black woman to sit on the Court.

Which two Nordic countries applied to join NATO in May 2022?

Finland and Sweden had stayed out of military alliances for decades; Russia's attack on its neighbour reversed that within three months, and both had joined by early 2024.

Which company released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022?

OpenAI put it out as a free preview and was overrun: ChatGPT had a million users within five days and about 100 million within two months.

In January 2022, Baltimore surgeons transplanted a heart from which animal into a human?

A pig with edited genes supplied the heart, which kept David Bennett alive for two months; doctors later found it had carried a pig virus that may have helped it fail.

Which tennis star was deported from Australia in January 2022 over his vaccination status?

Novak Djokovic, unvaccinated, had his visa cancelled on "health and good order" grounds and flew out on the eve of the Australian Open; a year later he was let back in and won it.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won Brazil's October 2022 runoff against which incumbent?

Jair Bolsonaro lost by under two points, Brazil's closest presidential result, and never publicly conceded; in 2025 he was convicted of plotting a coup to stay in power.

Which Filipino won the May 2022 presidential election in a landslide?

Bongbong Marcos is the son of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, so his landslide returned the family to power 36 years after a popular uprising drove it out.

Which Ukrainian regional capital did Russia capture in March 2022 and lose in November?

Kherson was the only regional capital Russia captured in the first year of its invasion; when Ukrainian troops returned that November, residents sang the national anthem in the central square.

Explosions in September 2022 knocked out which undersea pipelines in the Baltic Sea?

Nord Stream: blasts near the Danish island of Bornholm ruptured three of the four pipes, though neither line was delivering gas, as one had been shut off a month earlier and the other never opened.

Everything Everywhere All at Once premiered at which festival in March 2022?

South by Southwest opened with it in Austin; a year later it won seven Oscars and became the first film launched at the festival to take Best Picture.

In God of War Ragnarök, released in 2022, Kratos's son Atreus also goes by which Norse god's name?

Loki is the name his giant mother wanted for him, as father and son learn at the end of the 2018 game; Ragnarök, which closes the series' Norse era, follows what that fate means.

Tim Allen voices the toy, but which actor voiced the space ranger himself in Pixar's 2022 film Lightyear?

Chris Evans played the "real" Buzz because the film is meant to be the 1995 movie that made Andy want the toy; in cinemas it flopped.

Abbott Elementary, the hit sitcom about teachers at an underfunded public school, is set in which city?

Philadelphia is creator Quinta Brunson's home town, and she named the school after Joyce Abbott, a teacher she had there; the city has since named a street after Ms. Abbott.