April 2024: 30 Days, a Total Eclipse and 22 Business Days
April 2024 opened on a Monday and closed on a Tuesday, 30 days laid out clean in a leap year. The grid holds five Mondays and five Tuesdays, 22 business days and eight weekend days across weeks 14 to 18. The month's centerpiece came early: on Monday, April 8, a total solar eclipse crossed Mexico, the United States and Canada, with about 44 million people in the path of totality.
A Monday month
April 2024 ran 30 days, Monday, April 1 through Tuesday, April 30, spanning weeks 14 to 18. The grid holds five Mondays: the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th. Tuesdays also run to five, on the 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th. Wednesday through Sunday each got four, and a month that starts on a Monday does not waste time warming up.
Last quarter fell on Tuesday, April 2, and the full moon rose on Tuesday, April 23. Between them, the new moon came on Monday, April 8, with first quarter on Monday, April 15. The new moon and the total eclipse shared April 8, which is how solar eclipses work. The moon must be new to stand in front of the sun.
Eclipse, then a restless earth
Totality ran from Mazatlan in Mexico across Texas and the Midwest to Newfoundland on Monday, April 8, crossing 15 US states. About 44 million people lived in the path. The next total eclipse over the contiguous United States waits until the 2040s.
The ground had already moved that month. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck off Hualien, Taiwan on April 3, the island's strongest in 25 years. A rare magnitude 4.8 tremor under New Jersey shook New York on Friday, April 5, one of the region's strongest since the 1800s.
Rain came next. On April 16, the heaviest rainfall since Emirati records began in 1949 flooded Dubai and the wider Emirates, and the same storm system killed around 20 people in Oman.
Late April brought floods as well. Storms from April 27 set off Brazil's worst climate-related disaster on record in Rio Grande do Sul. A dam burst in Kenya on April 29 killed at least 48 people.
Green jackets and record streams
Scottie Scheffler won his second Masters in three years on Sunday, April 14, pulling clear to beat debutant Ludvig Aberg by four strokes.
Taylor Swift released The Tortured Poets Department on April 19, a 31-track double album. It became the first album to top 300 million Spotify streams in a day and the first to reach 1 billion in a week, on 2.61 million US units in its first week. Even the outtakes had outtakes.
Streaming filled the evenings. Fallout arrived April 10 and Baby Reindeer April 11, a day apart, and both became word-of-mouth hits.
April 2024 ran Monday to Tuesday, with the sky's blackout eight days in. Even the moon kept the appointment.