It's always fascinating to me to see the local geographic breakdown of how New York votes. Great election-district level map from @thecity.nyc www.thecity.nyc/2025/11/04/e...

The stream has begun. Join us: www.youtube.com/live/fKA4Vpk...

You now get double the amount of the 404 Media Podcast. We're airing two episodes a week now, with one of those being an interview with someone we've crossed paths with. This week, Joshua Aaron, creator of ICEBlock. Subs get early access. Apple/Spotify/YouTube: www.404media.co/the-crackdow...

Spent the weekend visiting family in the DC suburbs. What an absolutely perfect time of year.

Good morning from the Amtrak Northeast Regional. Truly one of my favorite places to think, read, write and work on projects. The best way to travel and it’s not even close.

Tailscale is genuinely one of the most useful tools I've adopted over the past few years. It simplified a piece of the puzzle enough to push me over the edge and start making my own self-hosted web tools all the time. Knowing I can securely access apps hosted in my apartment from anywhere rules.

Just landed a pretty big refactor of the Svelte-powered @urbaninstitute.bsky.social data viz component library that fully embraces runes syntax across all of our components. Svelte continues to be a flexible and powerful tool for our work. Check out our code on Github github.com/UrbanInstitu...

The US federal government's spending on housing—directly through the budget, or through tax expenditures—amounts to more than $400 billion a year. Only about 1/4 of that goes to low-income renters. The majority is spent on subsidizing higher-income homeowners. www.urban.org/research/pub...

Today @urbaninstitute.bsky.social launches a new data tool: The American Affordability Tracker. We're collecting data that tracks the rising costs of a secure lifestyle, and indicators of financial distress that are contributing to a growing crisis. See the data here: www.urban.org/data-tools/a... 📊

Did you know that nearly half of families in the US with children under 4 struggle to afford diapers? 📊 A new data tool from @urbaninstitute.bsky.social looks at data in states and counties to understand where the largest gaps are. www.urban.org/data-tools/m...

Excited to share this new piece from @urbaninstitute.bsky.social @wcurrangroome.bsky.social @andrewrumbach.bsky.social @sara-mctarnaghan.bsky.social and team that gives an excellent data-driven overview of the last 20 years of natural disasters and federal spending in Gulf Coast states. Lots of 📊!

New visual story: Inside the relentless race for AI capacity The quest for superintelligence is spurring a data centre boom — but critics question the cost, environmental impact and whether it is all needed ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

When I read Mood Machine earlier this year, I began seriously thinking about cancelling my Spotify sub. This piece from @hearingthingsco.bsky.social finally pushed me to act. I've been buying more music from @bandcamp.com, and from now on I'll be using a different platform for streaming.

Cremieux’s real name is Jordan Lasker. I put his name in the newspaper. He’s a scientific racist www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

New case study up on my redesigned website! Full process of building a custom #datavisualization tool: brainstorming and prototyping to refining the UX through cross-functional teamwork and creative problem-solving! Inspired by @alv9n.com's great project walkthroughs!

What a beautiful new album from Duval Timothy out this week: duvaltimothy.bandcamp.com/album/wishfu...

This week, @urbaninstitute.bsky.social launched the Education-to-Workforce Framework data tool. This was one of the more complex @svelte.dev apps we've built, and @benkates.com led the way on development and made something really cool with this one. apps.urban.org/features/edu...

Learn ggplot from the best in the field! 👇 This is also super interesting for my friends in science and their research groups.

NYC’s congestion pricing is a policy miracle: Less traffic, less noise, faster transit, more business sales, more transit revenue. And it hasn’t produced the negative effects outside the cordon zone we were afraid of. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

the html review 04: my favorite internet journal put out a fourth issue of experimental web writing https://thehtml.review/04/

New data tool launch today 🚨 @urbaninstitute.bsky.social's Federal Infrastructure site. It includes detailed information on funds from 110 programs across all states, counties & metro areas. Tool pinpoints the support that communities receive for transportation, housing, energy, water & broadband.

Very gratifying to see three data visualization projects we worked on at @urbaninstitute.bsky.social longlisted at the Information is Beautiful awards. Kudus to @mitchellthorson.com @benkates.com and @arobotwriting.bsky.social for their outstanding work bringing these complex datasets to life.

For the German election we wanted to use a cartogram of German election districts but didn't find anything good, so we created our own. Here's a little nerd thread how the final algorithm worked 🤓 🧵 #gis #cartogram #election #datavis #cartography

New research @urbaninstitute.bsky.social shows that mass deportations would likely worsen the housing shortage by decimating the labor force. Immigrants make up >23% of the construction workforce & more in FL, TX. About half are estimated to be undocumented immigrants. www.urban.org/urban-wire/m...

HUD programs support more than 5 million low-income households. They're now under threat of big cuts. Our new data tool @urbaninstitute.bsky.social provides detailed info about people supported by HUD programs—and funds received—in every state & Congressional district: www.urban.org/data-tools/f...

Dismantling the Dept of Ed or disrupting functions like enforcing critical civil rights laws or halting IDEA funding could affect students with disabilities across the US. The number of public school students with Individualized Education Programs may surprise you: www.urban.org/urban-wire/h...

How long will housing recovery following LA's wildfires take? My team @urbaninstitute.bsky.social requested data on four recent fires and analyzed the recovery phases along three key milestones: 1) Debris removal 2) A building permit and 3) Certificate of occupancy www.urban.org/urban-wire/w...

Even among families who can afford most of their day-to-day needs, many cannot weather unexpected expenses, like trouble with their car or a visit to urgent care. Urban has new analysis out showing, by state, how many families lack the resources to thrive. www.urban.org/urban-wire/h...

Curious about the thinking behind the 📊 charts in a project like the @urbaninstitute.bsky.social Upward Mobility Data Dashboard? Check out this new behind-the-scenes blog post from @aleszu.bsky.social and yours truly where we talk about our chart design process: medium.com/urban-instit...

42% of Americans would live in a smaller home in a more walkable community. Yet the reality is that, in most metro areas, those communities are few & far between—and they’re typically too expensive for many people to afford. Work by @harrystevens.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Proud to be a part of the Urban Institute Employees Union. Grateful to the bargaining committee and everyone who has worked so hard for this contract! 💪

Had family in town and did some tourist stuff this weekend. Good views of NYC will never get old to me.

Happy Thanksgiving! Sign up for our starter pack of great researchers @urbaninstitute.bsky.social working to understand social and economic policy across the US and in multiple policy sectors, identify failures of governance, & design best practices to advance equity & environmental sustainability.

📝 Text matters in data visualizations! We often focus on graphics, but research shows text is crucial for understanding. A thread on why and how text can elevate your data stories: 🧵 #dataviz 📊

The books machine is back!

For developers, Sill is open source! I've got to find time to write a lot more documentation, but with enough digging it should be self-hostable anywhere you can run a Docker container. github.com/TylerFisher/...

This is a beautiful and harrowing piece of visual work. It illustrates the journey of microplastics from our daily lives to our ocean ecosystems, and even into the sea floor itself.

Evan is 100% right about these little details. I would go even further. Even as professionals, it’s hard to achieve this level of polish. It’s the exact shade of grey, the text size relative to one another, the line spacing, the length of the annotations. Truly harder than it looks.

Interested in how the @urbaninstitute.bsky.social 📊 data viz team builds interactive data tools? The @svelte.dev code powering this recent piece is open source and available on Github: github.com/UrbanInstitu...

Excited to announce the public beta for Sill, my new link collection tool for Bluesky and Mastodon! Sill connects to your accounts and watches your timelines for new links. It then aggregates those and shows you the most popular links in your network. Yes, it's like Nuzzel. Sign up at sill.social!

As usual, this piece from @aworkinglibrary.com is inspiring. It offers some clear thinking about attention, media, and some helpful ideas on how we build a better world.

WAPO ran a feature on resilience measurement using data from a proprietary provider. The tool allows invites users to see how their city/place stacks up to others across the US on risk and resilience. Some reactions as a researcher who has endeavored to measure resilience in place:

Many great tips on polishing data viz work in this thread.

Introduce yourself with four video games

Watched Geographies of Solitude over the weekend - an absolutely beautiful visual and sonic experience. letterboxd.com/mitchthorson...

The @urbaninstitute.bsky.social data viz project template is officially running on @svelte.dev version 5 now. New data tools and features powered by runes coming soon.

I wrote about the week on Bluesky and why it gives me hope. Most of this is trying to contextualize its popularity alongside Threads, which is trash and has cannibalized Mastodon in what (IMO!!!) is a really harmful way thus far www.404media.co/the-great-mi...

🧵Okay let's do some BTS for Axios' elections #dataviz. 1/5: We used <canvas> for our big maps, which means we had to do some tricks with color hashes to get interactivity. What the reader sees vs. what the computer sees. Details on how it works: observablehq.com/@camargo/can...

📊 A new data tool from @urbaninstitute.bsky.social shows that millions of Americans would lose their health insurance if the enhanced premium tax credits are allowed to expire at the end of 2025. Explore the tool to see who would be most impacted: www.urban.org/data-tools/h...

NYC is having the driest fall on record... only 0.01 inches of rain fell in October. There were 29 whole days with no rainfall, the second longest stretch in the city's history. gift link: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...