News outlets tend to highlight the first 100 days of a new administration, and they like to show the changes with charts. It gives a feel for a true direction instead of empty claims and where we might be headed for the next few years. This time around was no exception.

For Bloomberg, Mark Niquette and Gregory Korte charted the economy, which is complex and can’t be shown with a single metric, so they showed several, such as inflation expectations:

For Axios, Jacque Schrag and Natalie Daher used a timeline of events, color coded by type:

Irineo Cabreros and Aatish Bhatia, for NYT’s the Upshot, used eight charts, closing with approval rating:

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post used ten charts and made sure to number them. On executive orders aimed at the bureaucracy:

Financial Times (paywalled) also went with ten charts to show the first 100 days. Reuters used 47 photos instead.

I am sure there were many more, but you get the picture.

Each year, poverty thresholds are calculated based on the cost of living, so thresholds rise over time with inflation. However, the federal minimum wage hasn’t changed since 2009 in the United States, which means the minimum wage is now a poverty wage:

When the minimum wage was created as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the policy was intended to protect the nation from “the evils and dangers resulting from wages too low to buy the bare necessities of life.”1 The federal wage floor is clearly not fulfilling this objective anymore because of a historically long period of inaction by Congress. The last time Congress increased the federal minimum wage was in July 2009, meaning that as prices have risen over the last 15 years, the value of the minimum wage has fallen by 30%.

You have to pick up a bottle of wine but don’t know what to get. You see a bunch of animals on the labels. Do that bird or amphibian tell you anything about the quality of the wine? For the Pudding, Fox Meyer with Jan Diehm analyzed wine price and quality to find out.

Most animal categories followed a similar curve, but these guys tended to avoid the bottom right corner. This means very few bottles with frogs, snakes or lizards are good deals, and should be avoided if that’s your priority.

I’m going to need some real-world tests to verify.

For the Guardian, Nesrine Malik warns of generative AI leading towards a reality where we don’t know what to trust with our own eyes:

But whatever the intent of its creators, this torrent of AI content leads to the desensitisation and overwhelming of visual palates. The overall effect of being exposed to AI images all the time, from the nonsensical to the soothing to the ideological, is that everything begins to land in a different way. In the real world, US politicians pose outside prison cages of deportees. Students at US universities are ambushed in the street and spirited away. People in Gaza burn alive. These pictures and videos join an infinite stream of others that violate physical and moral laws. The result is profound disorientation. You can’t believe your eyes, but also what can you believe if not your eyes? Everything starts to feel both too real and entirely unreal.

Social feed algorithms were already pointing us in this direction, but that was at least an aggregation of reality. The sheer volume of generated artificial images, video, audio, and text only speeds up the convergence.

iPhone parts are manufactured and assembled by different countries, which makes it tricky to define where an iPhone, the singular product, is made. Financial Times breaks the phone into pieces to show where they come from, which includes China, India, South Korea, and Japan.

“In the beginning it was about low labour costs — companies went to China because it was cheap,” says Andy Tsay, professor of information systems at Santa Clara University’s Leavey Business School. “But they stayed in China, and now they are stuck with China for better, or for worse. China is fast, flexible and world class, so it’s about much more than low labour costs now.”

Kind of like cars and a lot of other things in your home.

Many household items in the United States are almost entirely from China, making it a challenge to imagine a life where Americans buy everything domestically. For the New York Times, Pablo Robles, Agnes Chang, and Lazaro Gamio use a sketched floor plan color-coded by the percentages.

Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets has been showing up in highlight reels for his no-look passes. For the Ringer, Michael Pina breaks it down as a proxy for basketball IQ.

According to Sportradar, this season, Jokic recorded 143 potential assists and 89 actual assists when his line of sight was at least 40 degrees different from the path of his pass (both marks rank in the top 10 in the league). They come from myriad locations, flung to outside shooters, weakside cutters, and airborne lob threats.

Sportradar tracks the location of a player’s ears and nose to approximate line of sight. They track everything now. How long before we know energy, hydration, stamina, and court awareness in real-time offered by an NBA League Pass premium-data-plus-pro-super-duper plan?

Pope Francis’ papacy started in 2013 and lasted 12 years and 39 days. For Axios, Jacque Schrag shows the duration against past pontificates since the 20th century. The rare Gantt chart makes an appearance.

With the passing of Pope Francis, the Washington Post charted the ages of past popes during their pontificate. Pope Francis was 88 years old, making him the second oldest to Pope Leo XIII in 1903.

Election data should be publicly available and easy to access at high granularity, but it’s not. The Downballot, which has worked through the manual process of piecing together district-level data for the past five presidential elections, published the results for 2024:

You may be surprised to learn that very few states publish election results at the district level, even though all could do so easily. Instead, we have to manually gather precinct-level results from hundreds of counties—some of which don’t even post them online—then clean that data and transform it into easily digestible district-level numbers.

Find the complete data here.

When you think about people who work for the U.S. federal government, you might assume that most of them work in or around Washington, D.C. However, federal employees are spread across the country, working in all 50 states. For the New York Times, Zach Levitt mapped the employee counts for major agencies, based on payroll data as March 2024, before the mass layoffs began.

This will shock many. There are influencers on X who had high engagement with their posts, but after getting in kerfuffles with the app’s owner Elon Musk, engagement conspicuously declined. For the New York Times, Stuart A. Thompson shows the drops through average daily views on X for three such users.

It’s difficult to say the direct cause of the drops, because there’s no transparency into the feed algorithm, but at the very least, they appear related to Musk activities.

The good stuff from April: Here are tools you can use, data to play with, and resources to learn from.

The other morning, my eyes opened about an hour earlier than usual to the sound of birds chirping outside. Ah, nature’s alarm clock. For the Washington Post, Alyssa Fowers, Leslie Shapiro, and Emily M. Eng tabulated the most common birds in each county during the year. Press play to hear the songs.

The Washington Post worked with bird-sighting lists from eBird to determine the most common migratory birds every month from February through May in each county in the contiguous U.S. in 2023 and 2024. Only counties with at least 20 birdwatching lists each week were included. Any bird present in the first week of February and the last week of May was considered a resident of that county and excluded from that county’s spring soundtrack. In counties with more than five birds per month, the five most common migratory birds were included.

DOGE is taking agency data in an effort to compile a master database for tracking immigrants. For Wired, Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott break it down:

While government agencies frequently share data, this process is documented and limited to specific purposes, according to experts. Still, the consolidation appears to have administration buy-in: On March 20, President Trump signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to facilitate “both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records.” DOGE officials and Trump administration agency leaders have also suggested centralizing all government data into one single repository. “As you think about the future of AI, in order to think about using any of these tools at scale, we gotta get our data in one place,” General Services Administration acting administrator Stephen Ehikian said in a town hall meeting on March 20. In an interview with Fox News in March, Airbnb cofounder and DOGE member Joe Gebbia asserted that this kind of data sharing would create an “Apple-like store experience” of government services.

They’re taking what they want and discarding the rest. If this cycle continues, it doesn’t seem long before you or someone you know becomes a statistical error that can’t be fixed.

The Comic Sans Map by Vole.wtf is proof that if you make enough noise and keep making demands, the world eventually delivers. It’s a regular map that uses data from OpenStreetMap, but all the location labels are in Comic Sans.

The National Bureau of Economic Research studied before-and-after effects of about 20,000 users who deactivated Facebook and Instagram. Their findings suggest that emotional state, happiness in particular, improved with deactivation.

We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.

I wish they showed results with more granularity instead of just averages and abstract effect sizes. It seems like full distributions would be more interesting at the scale they had to work with. But the results seem to make sense.

I know people who spend all day every day on social media, and I always wonder what that does to their everyday thinking. This study, and the prior studies that the NBER researchers compared against, isn’t much comfort in that department.

As data provides ways to more accurately estimate how things are going, the administration continues its removal of federal datasets that they don’t agree with. For ProPublica, Alec MacGillis reports:

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

Reality is going to hit regardless. Less data means diminished resources to prepare for the inevitable, like an unhealthy person unwilling to get a checkup.

If you use NOAA data, now seems like a good time to download it before it disappears. A running list of NOAA data products covering climate, environment, and weather are scheduled for retirement over the next few weeks.

I don’t keep track of NOAA datasets, so I’m not sure what products are just running their course and which are part of efforts to avoid measurements. For example, some datasets haven’t been updated in a few years and items further down the list were scheduled for retirement last year. But I suspect the most recent scheduling is not business as usual.

Some datasets that seem notable:

• Global Ocean Currents Database (GOCD)
• OceanNOMADS
• Total Sediment Thickness for the World’s Oceans and Marginal Seas
• Geological History of the World’s Oceanic Crust
• Thermal (geothermal) Hot Springs List for the United States
• United States Earthquake Intensity Database
• Coastline Extractor