David Byrne and crew brought some joy to the Tiny Desk recently. This has to be one of my all-time favorites: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNmc...

🎉📚Happy books day! NPR's Books We Love 2025 (formerly the Book Concierge) is up. apps.npr.org/best-books/#...

@npr.org has live results from key elections: VA gov, NJ gov, NYC mayor, CA redistricting prop, and 2 CO ballot props: apps.npr.org/2025-electio...

📊🔊 Data sonification: New Orleans' rising temperatures, conveyed via the tempo of a brass band's music www.npr.org/transcripts/...

I just realized that Illustrator and Photoshop's versions of the "Save for Web" panel have the Save/Cancel/Done buttons in the same place but in different order. Maybe that's why I always accidentally cancel out of them so often — I mean to click "Save" but click "Done" by mistake.

Made this little guy to track the substantial growth of Erin's tropical-storm-force winds #mapshaper #turfjs #flubber #svelte5 🎁 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Got to nerd out a little about world maps. www.npr.org/2025/08/21/n...

College students and recent grads: Come intern at NPR this fall/winter! Apply by June 30. ➡️ Graphics + Web Archivist internship (with my team + our Research, Archives & Data Strategy team): job-boards.greenhouse.io/nationalpubl... ➡️ All internships: job-boards.greenhouse.io/nationalpubl...

Today marks 9 years since NPR colleagues David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna were killed on assignment in Afghanistan. The memorial display at NPR honors their memory. The camera David was carrying when he died is on the left. We remember them on this day and always.

Coming soon: Fall/Winter 2025 internships at @npr.org. Watch this space: www.npr.org/about-npr/18...

Join my team at NPR! We're hiring for a senior graphics reporter. Remote-friendly (in the US). grnh.se/f78153425us

TIMELINES: 100 days of major Trump admin actions re: DOGE, immigration, tariffs, foreign policy, retribution, civil rights and Signalgate, compiled by Domenico Montanaro @npr.org @heidiglenn.bsky.social. SO MUCH has happened in the past 3 months; it's really something to see it listed out.

🌸 Update to this project, just in time for spring: @danielpwwood.bsky.social added support for zip code search and made transition animations sensitive to whether `prefers-reduced-motion` is set.

Fascinating deep-dive on an 1855 railroad company org chart, unearthed in the Library of Congress archives: www.c82.net/blog/?id=98

@ximenabustillo.bsky.social did extensive reporting and research for this, and we worked together to boil this complex process down into a series of flowcharts. Thanks as well to to editor Anna Yukhananov, art director @emilybogle.bsky.social, illustrator Ana Galvañ and copy editor Pam Webster.

The back-and-forth volley of tariff threats so far this year:

New project: An Israeli strike on a Gaza apartment building killed 132 members of one family in October 2024. It was one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the Israel-Hamas war. The few survivors documented the dead via handwritten lists, which they shared with NPR. apps.npr.org/gaza-buildin...

This illustrated/animated NYT essay about agoraphobia and the grocery store is so beautifully done. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

As President Trump addresses a joint session of Congress tonight, reporters from across NPR's newsroom will fact-check and offer context as the speech unfolds.

Kee Malesky, NPR's research librarian for more than 20 years, has died at age 74. She left NPR in 2014. She's remembered for her love of facts, and here's another irrefutable one: She will be missed.

A look at the relative contagiousness of measles and other viruses, the role vaccination plays, and vaccination rates in TX counties.

I enjoy the use of sliders / interactivity here to demonstrate data viz literacy concepts.

More than a third of the contracts DOGE posted online would not actually save any money if canceled, according to DOGE themselves. In all, estimated savings from the initial DOGE list of just over 500 contracts that @npr.org found to be cancelled runs closer to $2 billion.

Recently on the team blog: Elections developer Shajia Abidi wrote about some experiments with AP testing and results data, Github Actions and Slack notifiers. blog.apps.npr.org/2025/01/29/e...

Update (3pm ET on February 5th): the Census FTP site, including the ACS flat files and TIGER/Line shapefiles, is back up! This means that your #rstats / #Python Census geodata packages are now working as normal. Get your data now!

Everything is a 403 right now, e.g. www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TI...

In love with this Reuters piece about cozy games that is itself a cozy game. www.reuters.com/graphics/VID...

Worth a listen: NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, reflects on reporting and living through the war. (from late December) www.npr.org/2024/12/29/n...

Since Feb. 2021, @npr.org has followed all the known January 6 defendants as they've gone through the legal process. Here's the database: www.npr.org/2021/02/09/9...

Love this deep dive into "Goodnight Moon" 🐰🌙 by two of my favorite modern children's book authors, Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen:

New collab w/ @nprmusic.bsky.social: The 124 best songs of 2024, in a filterable grid format. www.npr.org/2024/12/04/g...

Between sales and holiday greetings, I'm reminded this is a great time of year to prune all the email lists that I'm on.

New on the team blog: Remember that wonderful project about USDA plant hardiness zones from earlier this year? @danielpwwood.bsky.social, with an assist from Brent Jones, wrote up how the map stack worked: blog.apps.npr.org/2024/11/26/s...

Useful new-to-me Google Docs feature: Right click on a selection of text and copy the snippet in Markdown format — links and everything. There's also a "Paste from Markdown" option to go the other direction. support.google.com/docs/answer/...

📚 Happy books day! NPR's Books We Love (formerly the Book Concierge) is back with reading recommendations for 2024. apps.npr.org/best-books/#...

Always here for textile-based datavis. In this case: a bathymetry blanket.

@capitalweather.bsky.social on incremental updates to official hurricane maps, and the work left to do: www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024...

With the recent surge in users, I've once again updated the NPR / PBS / public media starter pack. Now with 50% more posting supported by viewers like you! If I'm missing someone who's active on Bluesky please do let me know. I'm more than happy to add folks as they arrive.

What we did re: CT — Switched to township-level data/maps for New England states. Matching identifiers + related data was a pain. But it's lovely, thanks to Juweek Adolphe + Shajia Abidi, and hopefully more relevant for folks who live there. apps.npr.org/2024-electio... apps.npr.org/2024-electio...

Am I on some kind of list? (Hopefully a good kind. 😰) I've gotten a surprising number of new followers here lately. Hi, all.

It's election night in the United States. Follow along with special coverage and live results on NPR dot org. apps.npr.org/2024-electio...

New visual narrative around the shrinking Aral Sea — a collaboration between NPR's International, Visuals and Graphics teams: apps.npr.org/aral-sea-shr...

I'm having to say "we'll need to figure what to do about Connecticut" an awful lot these days re: election results and historical data. 🫠 Context: www.bls.gov/cew/classifi... (My headaches aren't specific to this BLS survey, but it has a pretty succinct summary of what happened.)

New from NPR: How to register to vote in all the U.S. states, territories and DC apps.npr.org/voter-regist... "National Voter Registration Day" is a bit of an arbitrary holiday, but it's as good a peg as any to roll out this genuinely useful resource for the fall. Some deadlines are already near!

JOB: NPR's arts and culture hub has a new fellowship to work on books coverage (including Books We Love). The program is named in memory of beloved books editor Petra Mayer. The job: job-boards.greenhouse.io/nationalpubl... More about Petra: www.npr.org/2021/11/16/1...

This NYT feature about NYC's best sandwiches is both simply-yet-beautifully designed and making me lament that lunch is still a few hours away. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Had our first team hackday in way too long. Chipped away at some tech debt, explored a couple new workflows and pushed a new template. Also a little teambuilding-through-minor-adversity devising a shared live hackday playlist. 🤣

New on the team blog: Connie Hanzhang Jin writes about their process for making news comics. blog.apps.npr.org/2024/05/29/m...

My team, working with the Climate Desk, made something that's weird and joyful and useful. Repo link and blog post(s) to come. In the meantime, enjoy: