The Year in Micro News

Plenty of big news happened in 2022. Frightening, fascinating, devastating and inspiring news with global implications. You can almost certainly, off the top of your head, name something that fits these descriptions. (And if you can’t, just remember Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars was, in fact, this calendar year.)

But what may not come so easily to mind are the littler things. What happened this year in popular culture and far-flung corners of social media may not have broken through your self-curated internet experience.

Perhaps you didn’t hear about that billionaire’s secret baby. Or you missed the week (and subsequent weeks) of the feud between that British actor and that New York restaurateur. Do the words “bucket bunnies” mean nothing to you? “Hurricane shark,” maybe?

This is the year in micronews, an attempt to chronicle the little things that happened across the internet that immediately left our minds, if they even registered at all.

Posts may get deleted and beefs settled. Entire social media platforms might seem on the verge of collapse. But, still, the internet never forgets. So join us and take a stroll down 2022’s digital memory lane.

The Edible

Jennifer Aniston’s Salad Debunking

If you search for the “Jennifer Aniston Salad” on TikTok, you’ll find millions of videos about a very specific chickpea salad — garbanzo beans with cucumbers, feta, red onions, bulgur and a healthy topping of several herbs. The “Friends” star was rumored to have eaten the dish every day on the show’s set for years. “I feel like I’m disappointing everybody, but that’s not my salad,” Ms. Aniston told Shape. “It looks delicious, but it’s not the salad that I had on ‘Friends.’”

Olivia Wilde’s Salad Dressing

A blip in the dramatic timeline during the release of Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling” came courtesy of a Daily Mail story about her split from the actor Jason Sudeikis and a rumored on-set affair with Harry Styles, who stars in the film. In the article, a nanny who worked for Ms. Wilde and Mr. Sudeikis said Mr. Sudeikis had laid down in front of a car Ms. Wilde was about to drive off in to keep her from, allegedly, bringing Mr. Styles a salad made with her “special dressing.” What was the dressing? Ms. Wilde later