Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which translates to Magnificent Humanity in English. It is focused on preserving human life as AI technologies change the way we interact with information and data.

On the misconception of AI as something human:

It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.

Bookmarking this for further detailed reading. There is a lot to digest.

Birth rates are falling nearly everywhere. For Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch explores why that is, from shifts in education, work, how we interact with others, choices in relationships, and of course, technology that was supposed to make connections easier.

An aging population means more seniors 65 years and older are taking care of other seniors. This grows more challenging with disabilities, financial concerns, and mobility. The Straits Times looked at the situation through the lens of seven seniors caring for other seniors and their daily routines.

The comic illustrations pull you in to these people’s stories. I like the running clock on each as you move through the day and stay tied to the schedules.

U.S. inflation is high, and the prices of almost everything are rising fast enough to notice when we go to the store. You know this. I know this. Your bank account knows this. But the U.S. Department of Labor posted this monstrosity of a chart that shows the handful of things that decreased in price, as if it were something to brag about.

Here is the full dataset from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Out of 340 line items, only 15% of them showed a negative change. The remaining 85% increased in price, including fuel oil, which increased by 54% year-over-year.

This is hardcore cherrypicking.

As a ratio of home prices to household income, the cost of buying a house grew by multiples over the past several decades. The New York Times editorial board used a stacking coin metaphor to show the magnitude of the costs across the country.

One coin represents $10,000. The width of the stack, or coins across, represents the median income. The height, or number of coin stacks, represents the home price multiple. So even though the median household income in San Francisco is more (wider stack), the cost of house more than makes up for that (more stacks).

I like the stacks. It reminds me of when I’d count months of collected coins as a kid and feel rich with my penny rolls.

This week, we talk limitations of the defaultiest of defaultiest chart types.

Speaking of careless AI usage, the open-access archive for research papers, ArXiv, is updating their Code of Conduct to account for generative AI. Usage is not banned, but slop is, which results in a one-year ban. Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section, posted the update on X:

Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated.

If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s).

We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.

The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue.

Examples of incontrovertible evidence: hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM (“here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?”; “the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments”)

It seems like it’d be helpful to put this on the actual ArXiv site instead of just floating it out there on X.

Still, necessary, so good on them. They’ll use a detection algorithm to flag papers. It’ll be interesting to see how it holds up as mistakes continue to look less like slop.

Disney shutdown FiveThirtyEight last year, but the archive stayed online. Well, they got rid of that too. All old FiveThirtyEight links forward to ABC News. Nate Silver goes into detail about the shutdown and mismanagement of the site and brand.

It would be nice if that work could be preserved for the public record. I don’t know what plans Disney has for FiveThirtyEight, if any. But I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. I’m probably the logical high bidder, though the value is rapidly depreciating as what’s left of the site falls into disrepair. At a minimum, we’d restore the archive, with prominent links to Silver Bulletin.

We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight. It apparently wasn’t a long conversation, so I don’t have a lot more color to report than that.

Hanlon’s Razor states: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But honestly, I don’t know which explanation is better suited to ABC. During the second half of my tenure with Disney, it felt like they were putting almost literally zero effort into any decisions involving FiveThirtyEight (other than my being featured prominently in their election night coverage).

In its heyday, FiveThirtyEight was a boon for statisticians and data folks. Normal people saw how data analysis could be applied to everyday thinking. It’s too bad Disney and ABC News could never figure it out.

Steven Rosenbaum wrote The Future of Truth, a book about AI and reality that was published this month. It has generated and misattributed quotes throughout. Benjamin Mullin reports for the New York Times:

One of the quotes is attributed to Kara Swisher, a prominent technology journalist, in a chapter about A.I. lies. “The most sophisticated A.I. language model is like a mirror,” the book says Ms. Swisher wrote. “It reflects our own morality back at us, polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface. It’s not bound by Asimov’s laws or any ethical framework — it’s bound by the patterns in its training data and the objectives set by its creators.”

When asked about the quote, Ms. Swisher said in a text message that she “never said that,” adding that it seems the quote was made up by A.I. and not Mr. Rosenbaum.

“I also sound like I have a stick up my butt, according to ChatGPT,” Ms. Swisher said.

This seems not good. Probably won’t get the book.

For the Pudding, Russell Samora, with design and illustration by Shelly Tan, analyzed the words used in similes across popular fiction. Instead of just stopping at the obvious word counts, they get into the types of words, outliers, and ironic usage. On the simile “___ as hell”:

If we want to get pedantic, the first use with the exact structure (“as _ as _”) was from the 1954 novel The Refuge:

“‘Any woman with eyes like hers gets a reputation for being as sexy as hell, old boy.’”
This makes hell pretty unique in the dataset. Most nouns earn their place by embodying something, whereas hell just became another way to say “very.”

World Bank, which releases an atlas every few years, published an Atlas of Global Development for 2026.

Across the global development landscape, which countries are moving the fastest, and which are losing ground? The 2026 edition of the World Bank’s Atlas of Global Development puts progress at its center. Looking at how fast countries are moving toward better outcomes and facing different challenges, from their own individual starting points, this edition introduces a new framework to track development over the past 75 years, revealing how countries have advanced across key dimensions.

Framed as a set of stories on progress, people, prosperity, planet, infrastructure, and technology, the atlas covers a wide range of topics with a variety of charts. There’s a lot to poke at.

The Eurovision Song Contest is in its 70th year. Every year, each country submits an original song and performers vie for the top spot. Giuseppe Sollazzo plotted 1,795 songs from the past 70 years to see how themes and lyrics have changed.

Love has always been the dominant theme, but empowerment and resilience has the momentum and might take over soon.

Denice W. Ross and Christopher Steven Marcum, from the University of California at Berkeley, produced a field guide for federal data.

The purpose of this guide is to provide a more complete context for federal data users and stakeholders that will inspire them to consider a broader range of data types in their research and advocacy; we also hope it will also inform national dialogues about the future of federal data.

The Guide is organized into eight primary categories of federal data, each representing distinct collection methods, policy frameworks, and use cases.

Useful. Although maybe go without the generated illustrations.

For the Washington Post, Jeremy B. Merrill and Leslie Shapiro visualized users who won and lost money on Polymarket. The odds aren’t great.

A lot of users aren’t that good at predicting the future.

They’re losing money at roughly the same rate as online gamblers betting on sports and other real-life events at traditionally sportsbooks, according to the U.K. gambling regulator’s analysis of 2024 data.

This is based on research by Akey et al.

There was a small percentage of big winners, but of those, many appeared to be professionals placing thousands or even millions of bets in an automated way. Then there are those who probably have insider knowledge.

Maybe put your cash in a savings account. If you’re really after favorable odds, stick it under the mattress. It just won’t be as fun as losing money incrementally.

This week, we refresh an old chart with new data, interaction, and improved design.

Science profiled Hany Farid, a researcher in digital forensics at the University of California, Berkeley.

An interesting guide in the middle shows how simple geometry can expose a fake image. For example, in the generated image above, the lines connecting the figure to the reflection of the figure should converge at the same point. The lines are off, so the image is fake.

This lesson should be useful for about a week. Maybe a month? It seems that in the not too distant future, we won’t be able to find things that are off with just our eyes. So I’m glad there are people like Farid aiming to make it more difficult to fake reality.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published cost estimates for April 2026. If you’ve bought anything over the past month, you’ve likely noticed a rise. For the Washington Post, Rachel Lerman and Federica Cocco charted the rising cost of groceries this year, before and after the war with Iran.

Prices were already going up because of tariffs (remember those?), but the war is pushing costs up harder. Soon, we will pay for goods with cherry tomatoes.

The percentage of U.S. men in the workforce has been declining for decades, with a sharper shift the past few years. For the Washington Post, Lauren Kaori Gurley and Federica Cocco report.

“It’s not all retirement and education. … There are guys just dropping off the planet. They’re not looking after their kids. They’re not in school. They’re not in the labor force,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. “Across the board when we look at men, we see challenges that they face that leave too many men disconnected.”

Since 2006, the percentage is down six percentage points, which is maybe a bit less than you would think after looking at the line chart above. The reasons of course are multifaceted, but if I were to guess, I’d say more women in workforce has and will continue to change dynamics at work and at home.

Raymond Zhong and Harry Stevens, for the New York Times, go with a sketch aesthetic to describe the effects of El Niño. Some areas are wetter and others are drier. Although it’s still difficult to forecast the full range geographically and the magnitude of the effects. Because wind.

For the New York Times, Agnes Chang and Pablo Robles illustrate the journey from the Strait of Hormuz to the gas tank. The oil starts in a tanker, waiting to move through the strait, and the journey begins as you scroll. There are transfers, checkpoints, and changes in transportation.

I like the transfers where there’s a stop and you get taken through the various steps. Even if the strait opened right now, it would still take a month for travel, processing, and more travel.