DHS invading Minnesota in winter

After weeks of staring at 1890s Survey maps and Victorian railway timetables, I think I've finally mapped how each set of characters moves in the Sherlock Holmes adventure 'The Red-Headed League'. 📊 #maps #booksky Fancy new blogpost: aman.bh/blog/2026/ma... Just the map: aman.bh/projects/red...

I don’t know if this acceleration is the result of larger deployments or a more violent strategy, but either way it’s harrowing

Cool map. bluebookmke.substack.com/p/where-amer...

The US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since the early pandemic—year-on-year job losses have hit 145k as manufacturing, transportation, & mining industries lose jobs at a rapid pace while growth in construction has nearly zeroed out

2025 is now, officially, the worst year for job creation outside of recession since 2003. @byheatherlong.bsky.social

Just in - "According to @climatecentral.org, 2025 ranks as the third-highest year (after 2023 and 2024) for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters..." + Interactive graphics/data: www.climatecentral.org/climate-serv... + Climate Matters article: www.climatecentral.org/climate-matt...

The latest from YouGov (n ~ 2.2k): No one's buying this Greenland shit. Trump loses virtually everyone on the threat of force. He barely gets *half of Republicans* on "purchasing" Greenland. today.yougov.com/topics/overv...

Deploying emergency kitten videos Sound on

New Year, New Colour Tool for you data visualizers and maybe the odd designer obumbratta.com/colour

The Trump administration has said it was improving the SSA. A year in, it looks like the mess that everyone else predicted. Not enough staff, manipulation of numbers and declining performance. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

A deluge of work on regime change after the 2003 invasion of Iraq yielded strong (and rare) agreement in IR: it doesn't work & has terrible consequences. @profdownes.bsky.social's book Catastrophic Success lays it out, but it's right there in the title. www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

In celebration of Mamdani's first day in office, the map from our 2016 NYC atlas celebrating Queens as the most linguistically diverse place on earth. (800 languages spoken in NYC, according to NY's Endangered Language Institute, which collaborated with us on this map.

New record year for renewable electricity in Britain - thanks especially to strong solar output. Read our analysis of 2025 here www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026 🧵

Goodnight, sweet prince.

The share of counties where 95% or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles has dropped from 50% before the pandemic to 28%, according to our analysis of public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia. At least 19,000 schools are now more vulnerable to outbreaks.

The briliant @moriartymaps.com built the beautiful graphics in this piece including the extremely data-heavy lookup map. Read the full piece to check out all of his incredible work. Extremely grateful to work with such talented folks at the Post every day!

For last week's #TidyTuesday, I created a map of endangered languages around the world. Built entirely in R/ggplot2: transforming spatial coordinates, identifying hotspots and composing multiple charts! Code: github.com/gkaramanis/t... Inspiration: www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/co... #RStats #dataviz

No way this could end poorly. www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1...

From the NYT today, 2 charts on the brokenness of American politics:

Bedmap - Ever wondered what the land underneath the frozen ice of Antarctica looks like? We released the most detailed map of Antarctica's hidden landscape, revealing ice up to 4,757m thick and filling major knowledge gaps across the continent.

I'm going to do a deep dive into the last 15 years of traffic data and publish a full analysis, because it reveals some very interesting trends, but here is my initial takeaway: Bluesky in 2025 was more effective at driving traffic to our marine science website than Twitter. Ever. Was

Sharing Bright Line Watch's violin plot chart with alt-text.

Here's a quilt of Volume 4 of the Epstein document dump. Gives you a 10,000 foot view of the redactions. that's 2,704 docs.

A couple of interesting things: First, generally, voters respond as we'd expect: They are more likely to cross-over when their candidate is extreme, and less likely to when the out-party candidate is extreme. But the effects are tiny: Moving from least to most extreme D increases voting for R by 2pp

In fact, the five-year change in real wages (left chart) does a much better job of accounting for the changes in the fraction "better off" than the one-year changes (right chart) in the current business cycle and the prior one. On a five-year basis, real wages gains are still quite low.

On the flip side, 50% said they're worse off than a year ago. (The residual are those saying about the same.) Even more disconcerting, we have been stuck in a cycle of worsening finances. Since mid-2022, in each quarter at least 40% of people said they were worse off than the year before.

Call it affordability, vibes, politics: asking people how they're doing financially has been a grim exercise for some time. Only 21% in 4th quarter said they're better off financially than a year ago, near Great Recession lows. Drop in 3 steps: pandemic '20, high inflation '21-22, and past year.

GOP departures up to 27, the 3rd-most of either party since 2006. 1 and 2 are the GOP in 2018 and 2020. "Trump is president" really seems to be the highest-powered explanatory variable of the modern era. As always, the loudest of shout-outs to @the-downballot.com for the invaluable departure data.

With a resounding victory by Gary Clemons in Kentucky tonight, we now have 65 special elections to consider in 2025 1/

A short 🧵 on the diploma divide in the U.S.: I know others have identified this trend, but this is amazing to me. In 1980, knowing the share of a state's population that were college grads would tell you nothing about presidential vote. Today it is one of the strongest predictors.

Folks on Washington state community Facebook groups are arguing about whether images of local flood damage are real or not. Generative AI is making it so much harder for people to get the reliable information they need to make decisions during disasters.

At last, a chance to repost my favourite ever font-related controversy with alt-text, now that Calibri is back in the news.

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

I think we know who to thank for the failure of Trump's effort to bully Indiana Republicans into passing a new gerrymander: Aftyn Behn, Eric Gisler, and every Democrat who's run in a special election this year. The GOP saw all these overperformances, and they were right to be scared.

BREAKING: Indiana Republicans FAILED to pass a new 9-0 congressional gerrymander after enough GOP senators sided with Dems. The GOP's 7-2 map stays in place. Trump is trying to re-gerrymander maps nationwide. At least 11 Indiana Rs got death threats after he called for primaries—but it still failed

tfw the guy who made this chart is going to be in charge of the fed

Stealworkers

Fun little exploratory project. I mapped transit oriented surface parking lots in NYC and applied recent development densities to estimate housing potential. Link at the end. #NYC #Planning #Dataviz #mapping #maps #map #housing

Tonight a Democrat won by 2 points in a Georgia district where Trump had 56% of the vote in 2024. Are Indiana Rs sure they want to make a map where five seats have Trump <59%? Really sure? Really REALLY sure? (reposted to correct error) davesredistricting.org/join/2e7f19b...

BREAKING: Democrats have flipped a conservative state House seat in Georgia in yet another upset. It's a 14-point overperformance *and* the 25th legislative flip of the year for Dems. Republicans? Zero. Read our complete writeup here -->

Some (more) very big Dem overperformances on the Big Board tonight so far: FL-SD-11: Republicans hold deep-red district, but Dems overperform by 22 pts FL-HD-90: Dems hold blue-leaning district, outperforming 2024 by 17 and, perhaps more importantly, beating 2020 by 6

Ideology as aesthetics strikes again. @drkath.bsky.social studied this very question and found that yes Times New Roman is perceived as more conservative and sans serif fonts as more liberal- (likely because they are seen as less traditional and more modern): www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more." This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular. pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Absolutely amazing chart from @peterkellner.bsky.social's piece in @thenewworldmag.bsky.social today: www.thenewworld.co.uk/peter-kellne...

Wow... NYC's congestion pricing has led to big drops in PM2.5 and real improvements in local air quality.

Now that the Texas dust has settled, we're up to 47 open seats in the House in total, and that's before the traditional January surge of retirements. As always, our 20-year database of House open seats is here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I used the panel release from the @electionstudies.bsky.social to look at how votes and views have changed across the 2016, 2020, and 2024 election. There isn't a lot of analysis here but there are lots of plots and data. Liberal positions seem to be more consistently held (sort of)