Based on data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, 58% of families have money in the stock market, either directly or through mutual funds or retirement accounts. The percentage has been rising over the decades. Pew Research broke it down by race since 1989:

The stock market used to be an investment vehicle primarily for the wealthy, but it’s gotten easier and finances have shifted. The recent tariff-induced downturn is hitting everyone now, directly and indirectly.

With Streets to Stability, Crankstart illustrates a plan to reduce homelessness in San Francisco:

This report outlines 12 specific recommendations to improve the way people enter the system, the services they receive, and the overall management and support required to help them. If implemented, these changes would allow San Francisco to better support those at risk of losing their accommodations or living on the streets.

Everyone deserves lasting stability, particularly those who have historically faced barriers due to racial inequities and economic marginalization. Making this happen will require clear delineation of the responsibilities of government and service providers, with fewer hurdles and black holes. By embracing a clear, results-driven approach, inefficiencies can be reduced, and progress can be made.

The report leans heavily on conceptual graphics to illustrate the plans, which makes the complex systems easier to understand.

One might assume decisions that swing economies worldwide were based on careful research and calculations. That appears to not be the case with the administration’s recent tariffs, as first pointed out by James Surowiecki:

Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.

So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.

The administration, which did not provide insight into how the rates were calculated for trade on a global scale, eventually confirmed the above. They provide a formula with math symbols, perhaps to seem more official, but it amounts to a spreadsheet calculation between two columns.

They deemed real estimates to be too complex. So they printed a table with big numbers and called it reciprocal. It combines the Faker and the Descriptor from the DADC.

When bars are stacked, we can see shifts in composition, but the layout can also make it harder to see patterns individually. Let’s look at our options.

The Wall Street Journal has a handful of charts that briefly explain trade deficits and imbalance, which were used to calculate the recent “liberation” tariffs.

A trade deficit is the difference between the value of the goods and services a country imports and the value of goods and services it exports. A deficit means that a country is importing more than it exports. A surplus means the opposite. Economists sometimes examine the total trade balance—goods and services—and sometimes analyze just goods or services trade. Services include transportation, construction and the provision of accounting or legal support. The White House’s tariff analysis appeared to include only goods, not services.

As you might expect, there is a big income difference between those with college degrees and those with none. But there’s been a shift lately. For Bloomberg Businessweek, Dorothy Gambrell and Marie Patino show the breakdowns by age, generation, and race.

In 2023, the last year for which data is available, 25- to 34-year-olds with a bachelor’s degree earned exactly 200%—or twice as much—as people from the same cohort without one did. That’s a nice chunk of change, sure, but as more of the population earns a degree, that premium is getting smaller. In 1960 young adults with a degree saw the premium in their earning power peak at 237%.

Two-hit wonders are in between the obscure one-hit wonders and famous musicians. Chris Dalla Riva looked for the greatest, defining a two-hit wonder as an artist/group that had a top to hit and at least one top 30.

This list is kind of shocking. Pink Floyd, one of the best-selling bands of all-time, is a two-hit wonder? By the definition, I just outlined, yes. Pink Floyd’s albums always did better than their singles, though. In fact, Pink Floyd might be the platonic form of artists on the list. They are mostly in the rock universe and sell more albums than singles.

There are also other artists on the list that are typically classed as one-hit wonders. a-ha is a good example of this. Most known for their 1984 smash “Take On Me,” they technically landed another hit in the top 30: “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” Additionally, outside the U.S. they had many other hits, but the Billboard Hot 100 is focused on American sales and streams.

Now do three-hit!

Some people sneeze very loudly. For the Washington Post, Teddy Amenabar, Álvaro Valiño, and Artur Galocha used animated illustrations to show what brings that on, along with tips on how to sneeze quietly.

Maggie Appleton is at the point in her pregnancy when there’s a lot of waiting, so she’s her downtime to look at pregnancy statistics. Based on a 2001 study, she made an interactive chart that lets you enter a due date to see the probability that the baby is born on a given day.

Taking key metrics from that, I made a tiny tool that shows a probability distribution graph of spontaneous labour starting on each day of your pregnancy. I’ve found this helped ground my expectations of when babies normally tend to arrive, and how long I can wait until I need to start worrying about induction. You can enter your own due date, and whether you’re a first-time mum, to see your own stats.

The Science & Community Impacts Mapping Project (SCIMap) estimates the impact of proposed funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) across the United States:

We source our data from a public database of NIH grants that were active in 2024. We estimate the economic impact of NIH grants (or reductions in NIH funding) based on a recent report, which found that every dollar invested in NIH generated $2.56 in new economic activity in 2024. To estimate the number of jobs that would be lost if NIH funding is cut, we used the ratio of the number of jobs supported / research funds awarded in the 2024 fiscal year. We also use Census data on where U.S. commuters live and work to estimate how economic activity generated in each county can spread to adjacent counties.

Nationally, the estimates sum to $16 billion and 68,000 jobs lost. This is in addition to lost research and advances in science, of course.

Secret Base offers a much too complete history of slipping on banana peels, dating back to May 28, 1867.

Beware of banana peels. They are capable of inflicting great physical harm. Even worse, they might own you so badly that you’ll need to make a 33-minute documentary about them several years later simply to purge yourself of the abject shame and humiliation.

As Jon Bois narrates, a map and timeline show the place and time of each documented incident. A running tally for the types and affected body area supplies the cumulative totals.
Read More

Here are tools you can use, data to play with, and resources to learn from that flew across my desk in March.

Charles-Joseph Minard was born on March 27, 1781. Most who know the name associate it with Minard’s map of the Napoleon Russian campaign, but that work came later in life, post-retirement, at the ripe age of 88 years old. He had already been making flow maps for decades as a civil engineer.

From The Minard System by Sandra Rendgen:

Tarbé de Saint-Hardouin, who published a collection of biographies on the engineers of the Corps des ponts et chaussées in 1884, described Minard as a person of independent spirits: “The slowness of his advancement, compared to his contemporaries, was without doubt the result of the independence of his mind, and of the occupations he chose, with the single goal of satisfying his affinity for research and without considering the progress of his administrative career too much.”

Slow and curious is my jam.

See also Michael Friendly’s collection of Minard resources and inspiration.

I guess we’re going to learn a good bit about tariffs over the next few years. Bloomberg is keeping track by target and possible impact. While WaPo used four tariff stages, Bloomberg goes with three: imposed, threatened, or suspended.

Tariff announcements seem to waver in tone and finality depending on the day. It’s hard to keep track of what might happen and what is actually happening. For the Washington Post, Alyssa Fowers, Leslie Shapiro, and Amaya Verde provide a scrolling timeline to show where we’ve been and where things are at.

The icons, with tariff percentages attached, move between four stages: proposed, delayed, enacted, and dropped. There seems to be a lot of switching.

Any Map Puzzle by Ahmad Barclay lets you search for a location and play the location as a slide puzzle. Choose the map tiles (Stamen Watercolor, OpenStreetMap, and ESRI World Imagery) and grid size and puzzle away.

You’re familiar with AD and BC, but you probably haven’t heard of AiP for after iphone or ATP for after toilet paper. Jonny Thaw made a fun interactive that shows a given year compared against a lot of other things in history. So dumb, yet so informative.

23andMe, the business predicated on people sending cheek swabs to have their DNA analyzed, exposed the personal data of half of customers in a data breach a couple years ago. The company filed for bankruptcy. Lily Jamali for BBC reports:

Founded in 2006, the company went public in 2021 but has never turned a profit.

In September, the firm settled a lawsuit alleging that it failed to protect the privacy of nearly seven million customers whose personal information was exposed in a 2023 data breach.

In some cases, hackers gained access to family trees, birth years and geographic locations, by using customers’ old passwords. The data stolen did not include DNA records, according to the company.

If you used the service, maybe keep an eye on what happens to your data if the company goes under or is sold off. The California attorney general issued a customer alert with instructions on how delete your data, destroy your sample, and revoke data permissions.

Spring officially started last week here in the Northern Hemisphere. For Axios, Jacque Schrag mapped the hours of daylight gained in between the spring equinox on March 20, 2025 and summer solstice on June 20, 2025.

This is based on sunrise and sunset times from NOAA.

I started spring this weekend with yard work in a warm but not too hot low 70s. Not too shabby.