Revising the dataviz book is an opportunity to remind enthusiastic beginners of the bitter realities that lie ahead of them.

We're mourning yet again in Minnesota — and struggling to square the gut-churning video of Alex Pretti's final moments with official accounts. I'm teaching techniques of neutralization this term, so I made this quick slide on the DHS statement. Share if it's useful. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us...

Man, Du Bois had some bangers, but for me, it doesn't get much better than his scathing indictment of the "Christianity" of the United States. Certainly this was all true of the nation in his lifetime. But in my lifetime, his criticisms have never felt so true of the nation right now.

There are many signs of the fear and distress people are feeling in my home town of Minneapolis. One signal of elevated strain is the rise in 911 calls for help — up about 9% daily in the new year relative to previous daily averages across 2020-2024.

Unfortunately, all Census TIGER/Line and cartographic boundary shapefiles are down as of this evening. This means that the tigris #rstats and pygris #Python packages will not work, and geometry support in tidycensus will also fail. The Census API, for now, is still up.