Explore Interactive apps, data-stories, and case studies.
Teaching studios, apps, and data stories spanning public health, politics, business, and other public data. Filter by type or topic below — each piece opens in a new tab.
Browse by topic · 171 pieces
Elections & Voting
17 piecesPresidential returns, county swings, turnout, and the electoral map — interactive atlases and data stories on how America votes.
AppThe American Political Almanac · 1976–2024
An interactive atlas of U.S. presidential elections, 1976–2024 — national, state, and county returns, demographics, and ANES survey shifts.
BlogPresidential Election Atlas: 1976-2024
A state-by-state presidential election dashboard: move across 1976-2024, compare national outcomes, read the hex map, and inspect which states shifted most from the prior election.
BlogNewThe Attention Budget That Wasn't
We expected Congress to have a fixed attention budget that crises reallocate. Across 25 years of hearings, it doesn't — the calendar rules, most shocks never register, and only a pandemic emptied the schedule.
BlogNewThe Floor Time Gap
2.7 million Commons speeches: women won seats faster than they won the floor. But the gap was never that women speak less — it was who gets to be the busiest voice in the room.
BlogNewThe Mainstreaming Clock
2.7 million Commons speeches, 1979–2020: issues enter the parliamentary record on the schedule of legislation, not ideology — and the party talking most is usually the one holding the pen.
BlogNewWho Gets to Testify
32,676 congressional hearings, 107,000 witnesses: when a chamber changes party, the witness table changes too — advocacy groups out under Republicans, and a professional witness class that testifies everywhere.
Polarization & Public Opinion
17 piecesParty sorting, attitude gaps, and long-run survey trends — how American opinion divides, shifts, and hardens across groups and decades.
BlogCommunities Have Emotional Fingerprints
211,225 human judgments of Reddit comments reveal that communities run on distinct emotions — and that humans can't agree on what grief looks like.
BlogAmerica Didn’t Wait for the Unsorted to Die — They Switched
Track ANES cross-pressured voters from 1972-2024 to test whether partisan sorting came from generational replacement or switching among existing cohorts.
BlogAmericans Didn’t Fall in Love With Their Party. They Learned to Despise the Other One.
Use ANES feeling thermometers from 1978-2024 to separate in-party warmth from out-party dislike, distributional zeros, and affective polarization.
BlogInformation Doesn't Cool the Argument. It Sharpens It.
Across the ANES 1972-2024, the partisan gap on policy and racial attitudes is widest among the most politically knowledgeable Americans -- every year, and by a growing margin, even net of education. Information sorts; it does not depolar…
BlogOne Country, Two Timelines
ANES, GSS, and county returns show the American South did three things at once: it realigned on party and the vote, converged on economics, and grew more distinct on religion and culture.
BlogPartisans Finally Got Constraint
Revisit the partisans-without-constraint thesis with ANES issue-scale correlations, party-identification alignment, heatmaps, and sorting decompositions from 1970-2024.
Media, News & Advertising
11 piecesThe press, the archive, and the ad ledger — how stories get told, what gets covered, and who pays to be seen.
BlogNewAmerican Stories — A Booklet
A bound reading of nine American Stories investigations: how U.S. newspapers narrated catastrophe, violence, and reform between 1898 and 1933. Opens with the data and the GABRIEL method behind every article.
TeachingGDELT Media Agenda Lab
Search global news and television coverage as an agenda-setting lab: compare attention, tone, source geography, station airtime, and evidence cards from live GDELT APIs.
The Political Ad Ledger
A five-part read through India's political advertising disclosures — who buys, what they say, and what the ledger leaves out.
Open the collection
BlogNewHow a Moral Crusade Became a Governance Problem
Prohibition entered the Constitution through moral reform and democratic legitimacy. Fourteen years later, newspapers buried it under economics, administration, and regulated repeal.
TeachingNewThe Dead They Didn't Count
18,863 newspaper articles show how the American press framed the Titanic: quick to blame the company and mourn the spectacle, but nearly silent on the immigrant poor in steerage who died in the greatest numbers.
BlogNine Thousand Bylines
HuffPost's author fields record a business model reversing in real time: a 9,000-contributor open platform in 2014 re-concentrates into a staff core writing 42% of bylined output by 2016.
Growing Up in America
12 piecesAdolescence in the data: mental health, school, sleep, substances, politics, and belief among American teens across five decades.
BlogThe Great Divergence: Teen Political Identity
Track how U.S. high school seniors describe their political identity from 1976-2023, with gender gaps, ideological spectrum shifts, and post-2016 decomposition views.
BlogWithin Reach: Teen Drug Availability
Read four decades of Monitoring the Future survey data on how available teens think drugs are, comparing substances, grade levels, long-run declines, and 2024 levels.
Growing Up in America
A ten-part read on American adolescence — mental health, sleep, smoking, bullying, school safety, work, faith, and grades, across five decades of survey data.
Open the collectionHealth & Mortality
17 piecesLife expectancy, overdose deaths, chronic disease, and the geography of health across states, counties, and ZIP codes.
AppHealth of America’s ZIP Codes
A map-first atlas of 26 health and social-need measures across 32,409 ZIP/ZCTAs (CDC PLACES + Census), with stories and methodology.
BlogFour Subway Stops, Twenty-Four Years
Within a single American county, life expectancy at birth can differ by more than two decades. A tract-level tour of New York and Chicago.
TeachingSame Betas, Three Standard Errors · NHANES
One NHANES dataset, four variance machines, and exactly what the naive standard error quietly gets wrong.
BlogDeaths of Despair vs. Felt Despair
Case and Deaton mapped where Americans die of suicide, drugs, and alcohol. Gallup spent a decade asking Americans how yesterday felt. Lay the feelings over the deaths, and the measure that tracks the mortality map best is not sadness, no…
BlogHalf the Deaths, a Sliver of the Map
Half of America's gun homicides happen in neighborhoods housing about 9.5 percent of its people. Lorenz curves and a block-level look at Chicago.
TeachingNYC Metro ZIP Health Segments
Use health prevalence measures to build factor scores, cluster ZIP codes, and interpret the segments by correlating scores with income, age, college share, and deprivation.
Happiness & Well-Being
21 piecesLife satisfaction, time use, stress, and social connection — what large surveys reveal about how Americans are actually doing.
Blog2020: The World's Worst Year?
Gallup World Poll, 93 countries: in 2020 daily worry, sadness and stress hit their highest recorded levels, while the world’s rating of its own life barely moved.
BlogThe Well-Being Atlas
A publication of reproducible data essays on life satisfaction — Gallup World Poll, GSS, and WVS microdata across 50 years and 168 countries.
BlogAlone Together
A partner is worth about half a rung of the Cantril ladder, and the premium survives wherever you live. But a civic-rich county does not rescue the isolated — the married-vs-unmarried gap is the same in high-social-capital places and low…
BlogDoes Generosity Pay - Everywhere?
Across 155 countries, people who give — money, time, or a hand to a stranger — rate their lives higher and feel better day to day. The link is remarkably stubborn: it holds in rich countries and poor ones alike, and it is strongest for g…
BlogDoes the Ring Still Matter?
For fifty years, married Americans have reported being happier than everyone else. The gap has barely budged — and most of it survives even after you account for who tends to marry.
BlogDoes Community Substitute for Connection?
Putnam's heirs promised that civic fabric lifts everyone. Three and a half million Gallup interviews ask the sharper question: does it lift the people who need it most?
Business & Markets
26 piecesPricing, competition, advertising, and market structure — data stories and teaching cases from the business world.
AppChat FRED
Chat with the Federal Reserve Economic Data API. Explore economic indicators, time series, and datasets through natural conversation—powered by cached data for instant responses.
TeachingFast-Food Share of Wallet: COVID Impact
How did the pandemic redraw where consumers spent their fast-food dollars? A share-of-wallet dashboard that benchmarks chains against the category through the shock and recovery.
AppFAL Campaign Studio — AI Marketing Case Studies
Teaching case studies and FAL-powered tools for generative AI in creative marketing — study real campaigns, then turn a strategic brief into production-ready image assets.
TeachingNYC Airbnb: A Listings Atlas
Explore tens of thousands of NYC listings by neighborhood, room type, and price — a worked example of how exploratory views turn a raw marketplace dump into a map of where supply and money actually sit.
TeachingThe Southwest Effect
Does a low-cost carrier entering a route really pull fares down — and by how much, once you hold distance and demand fixed? A visual walk through the classic regression.
AppWorld Trade Atlas
A bilateral goods-trade explorer — 226 countries × 5,021 products, 1995–2024 (CEPII BACI), with country profiles, comparisons, and stories.
Consumer & Household Finance
9 piecesSpending, saving, debt, and financial fragility — how American households earn, borrow, and manage money.
BlogThe Complaint Machine
16.7 million CFPB complaints: the cleanest natural experiment in consumer finance, and a database that one product category swallowed whole.
BlogThe Fed Hiked. Your Credit Card Noticed.
Fourteen years of CFPB complaints show monetary policy reaching households through exactly one door: credit-card complaints triple after the 2022 hikes while mortgage complaints never move.
BlogThe January Echo
Amazon's musical-instrument reviews peak in January, not December — the sound of a million gifts being unboxed. Seasonality cleanly separates the instruments people give from the gear working musicians buy.
BlogFeeling Rich Is Not the Same as Being Rich
Across 147 countries, money reliably buys the feeling of financial sufficiency — and the feeling never tops out, across countries or within them. But whole regions feel far richer, or poorer, than their income says they should.
BlogThe Peak and the Plateau — A Decade of American Financial Well-Being
For a decade, Americans felt steadily better about their money. Then 2022 took it back — and the recovery never came.
Zillow state ZHVI panel
Wide state-level Zillow Home Value Index panel with monthly columns from 2000 through 2026.
Inequality & Mobility
7 piecesIncome and wealth gaps, economic mobility, and who gets ahead — evidence across places, cohorts, and generations.
BlogThe Places That Beat the Model
A five-variable model predicts neighborhood mobility with R² = 0.44. The residuals are the interesting part: the counties that out-perform their demographics, and the boomtowns that don't.
TeachingAn Index Autopsy
We rebuilt a deprivation index from scratch with PCA — no housing costs — and compared it to the canonical ADI. They agree on the gradient and disagree violently about New York.
BlogRaised Poor, Locked Up
For boys raised by poor families, the odds of growing up incarcerated rise with neighborhood deprivation — and, on the very same streets, fall heavily by race.
BlogThe Born-Rich Premium
What does a rich birth buy? The Opportunity Atlas prices the class premium neighborhood by neighborhood — and it varies twofold across America.
BlogThe Company You Keep
Twenty-one billion Facebook friendships, one question: which kind of social capital actually predicts whether poor children rise? Cross-class friendship does. Volunteering, clubs, and tight-knit networks barely register.
TeachingThe Slope Factory
We fit the deprivation–life-expectancy regression separately in 266 American metros. Every single slope came back negative. Many small models, one law.
Demographics & Society
11 piecesPopulation change, migration, family structure, and the social fabric — the long-run shifts beneath the headlines.
AppWorldlines — The World in Numbers
A cross-country indicators explorer — 85 measures of development, democracy, belief, and wellbeing across 217 countries (1750–2025), with country profiles, rankings, and peer benchmarking.
BlogAmerica Ran Out of Common Names
A century of Social Security records shows the quiet collapse of the common first name — and that name fads now burn out twice as fast as they used to.
BlogThe Rhythm of a City
8.6 million reported incidents over 25 years give Chicago crime a legible pulse: hourly, weekly, seasonal — and three distinct eras.
BlogWho Gets Remembered
4.4 million Wikidata biographies, sliced by birth cohort, occupation and gender: a measurement of memory itself.
BlogFifty Years of American Evenings
Since 1974 the GSS has asked the same four questions: how often do you spend an evening with relatives, with friends, with neighbors — or at a bar? The answers trace a half-century in which company grew rarer, screens grew brighter, and…
TeachingLottery ZIP Psychographics: How Neighborhoods Play
Segment active NYC ZIP codes from NY Lottery behavior signals, then interpret the PCA/factor score space with borough, income, retailer availability, and product-mix profiles.
Schools & Universities
7 piecesColleges, school districts, and the people they produce — cost and earnings, alumni networks, grade inflation, and who gets through.
BlogThe Toll Booth
College is sold as the great equalizer. Across 6,400 U.S. institutions it looks more like a toll booth: a for-profit earnings penalty, a net-price schedule that bills a poor family a third of its income, and 2,200 counties with no four-y…
AppNewCollege Ledger — Every U.S. College, on the Record
Cost by family income, graduate earnings and debt, and three decades of trajectory for 6,273 accredited U.S. colleges — College Scorecard + IPEDS, shown honestly: suppressed is suppressed, never zero.
BlogReading Is a Girls' Country
Across 12,360 school districts, girls out-read boys in 99.9 percent. Math is contested ground — and which side wins tracks the district's affluence.
The Alumni Archive
What Wikidata's archive of notable alumni says — and cannot say — about who universities produce, and when their famous women finally appear.
Open the collectionReligion & Belief
3 piecesReligious affiliation, practice, and belief — the reshaping of American religious life, told through survey data.
BlogThe Shape of Belief: World Religious Composition
Explore how global religious composition changes from 2010-2050 across regions, faith groups, population shares, and projected growth patterns.
BlogFrom Denomination to Devotion
Across the ANES 1948-2024, the religious cleavage in American presidential voting rotated from a denominational axis (Catholic Democrats vs Protestant Republicans) to a devotional one (frequent attenders vs seculars) that cuts across eve…
BlogReligion's Conditional Dividend
Across 143 countries, people who call religion important rate their lives higher and feel better day to day — but mainly where life is hard. As nations grow richer and safer, the religious advantage bends toward zero, and in the wealthie…
AI & Language Models
10 piecesWhat language models can and cannot measure — benchmarks, meaning, bias, and using LLMs as instruments on real data.
BlogAI’s Split-Screen Politics
Left-leaning channels cast AI as a classroom, a risk, and a governance problem; right-leaning channels cast it as a business engine, a productivity tool, and a national race.
AppInsight Digest
AI-generated book summaries to read or listen to — across philosophy, psychology, self-help, history, and geopolitics.
TeachingNewThe Gap Is the Story — Public Opinion on AI, Re-Checked
Nine charts on global and US public opinion about artificial intelligence, verified against source data, plus a ledger of what a widely circulated research summary got wrong.
TeachingNewBeyond the Stochastic Parrot — Chomsky, LLMs, and the Nature of Meaning
An interactive essay on the stochastic-parrot debate: what Chomsky claims, how language models actually work, and what the evidence says about machine understanding.
BlogNewThe Fairness You Can't Have — COMPAS, ProPublica, and the impossibility theorem
An interactive essay on algorithmic fairness: the COMPAS recidivism controversy, why calibration and equal error rates cannot both hold when base rates differ, and what the impossibility theorem means for anyone deploying a model.
BlogThe Commons Was Already Dying
23 million Stack Overflow questions show the knowledge commons peaked in 2016 and hardened long before ChatGPT arrived to finish the job.
Methods, AI & Data
3 pieces
BlogNewWhy the Data Won't Tell You Why — Causal inference for decision-makers
An interactive essay on causal inference: Simpson's paradox, causal diagrams, confounders and colliders, the difference between seeing and doing, and why every observational causal claim rests on assumptions the data cannot check.
BlogWeights Get the Point Estimate Right; the Design Gets the Uncertainty Right
Why survey-weighted means match full-design estimates exactly while their standard errors do not — and how this is the same problem clustered standard errors solve in econometrics.
AppResearch Data Gallery — SCRC & Dewey
A research-data gallery surfacing curated datasets for teaching and analysis.