My 2025 #rstats wrapped in honor of CRAN reopening for 2026: christophertkenny.com/posts/2026-0... Fun fact: I made 43 CRAN uploads in 2025 and 41 of them were successful!

Throwback to my favorite #rstats Ripley crashout where he removed a package because a maintainer called him Brian

Nothing like starting the day responding to a Brian Ripley hissy fit... He removes an #rstats package before the scheduled date, gets a bounceback from a *downstream* package, and archives all of the packages... CRAN volunteers time is the most valuable resource, yet Ripley just loves wasting it

Glad we have LLMs in everything so that GitHub tries to create commit messages like this... Just makes more work by having to delete the message to write in a correct one instead of just writing the correct one in the first place

Is there an #rstats best practices for including a shiny app in an R package? I see mastering-shiny.org/scaling-pack... by @hadley.nz and github.com/daattali/ddpcr by Dean Attali (couldn't find his handle!) - just curious on understanding best practices, bunding data, app, and the www folder etc.

@corymccartan.com and I have been playing with @paleolimbot.bsky.social's #rstats `libgeos` package. It's pretty awesome. Handles the hard parts so that you can connect Rcpp to GEOS with a few lines of code. Got some existing, optimized `geos` code to ~3x faster! paleolimbot.github.io/libgeos/

NYC 2025 Mayoral results as a dot density plot using the `dots` #rstats package (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...)

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

Support for Prop 50 in California is highly correlated with support for Harris in 2024 and even runs slightly ahead of her A sad day for democracy to have the future of competitive elections literally on the ballot and yet be so utterly defeated. Stands at 63.9% voting yes.

There are a lot of great posts out there that aren't very highly ranked. Don't rely on bluesky to find you great content; you can find it on your own! Here's how: #Rstats via @northeasternu.bsky.social's Storybench www.storybench.org/how-to-analy...

NYC map shaded by vote margin! We collected very granular precinct data and aggregated it to neighborhoods people actually recognize Bushwick, Flushing, Upper West Side, etc. datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Wrd72/ H/T @mitelectionlab.bsky.social @chriskenny.bsky.social @corymccartan.com @simko.bsky.social

For the on-air presenting and digital media, we also built a live neighborhood map: www.cbsnews.com/news/nyc-may... (now filled by margin!)

Here at the CBS News data desk with @chriskenny.bsky.social and @simko.bsky.social! Looking at the VA numbers

Finishing up prep for election night at CBS News' Data Desk! Sunday in NYC was the highest single day early votes since at least 2019 and maybe ever:

Tracking the early vote in NYC. Turnout in Manhattan is particularly striking. Brooklyn is higher in raw numbers, but Manhattan is tracking closer to a presidential year than the odd years.

As a member of the (now disbanded) National Academy of Sciences working group on differential privacy I can report some liberals want it gone, too, as its application tends to hurt disadvantaged communities

In my experience and conversations, most academics want it gone too. The parameter values necessary to make the data usable make the theoretical guarantees functionally useless. Better off using an empirically effective approach, like swapping. DP is a cute idea, but it’s a bad fit for the census

#rstats bskyr is updated on CRAN with lots of fixes and new features. Major additions are detailed vignettes support for direct messaging. Full list: christophertkenny.com/bskyr/news/

tinytiger ("Lightweight Interface to TIGER/Line Shapefiles") is now updated on CRAN to include support for 2025 census shape boundaries! #rstats Package website: alarm-redist.org/tinytiger/

On Monday, I taught an intro to #Quarto #quartopub workshop aimed at social scientists at Princeton. Slides and demos are publicly available here: github.com/christopherk...

As with past SCOTUS oral arguments on redistricting, here's a word cloud in the shape of the state (with stopwords and lawyer names removed):

redistio now uses @kylewalker.bsky.social's mapgl for interactive redistricting map editing! redistio is an #rstats package that uses Shiny to draw redistricting maps locally. Unlike other district editors, this provides access to our simulation algorithms, interactively! Short demo:

#rstats packages tinytiger and baf may again be seeing intermittent issues (again), as the Census Bureau has placed this redirect on their FTP sites. Empty list responses may also be possible, as the download is (sometimes) capturing the HTML page...

Presenting today!

This Reddit post (www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/s/aq...) came across my feed. I think the real question is: How can LaTeX compete with Typst going forward? LaTeX’s advantage now is size of the user base, not features. The next stable (0.14.0) version of Typst includes PDF embeds, the last missing piece.

Has anyone looked into building a Positron extension to enable styling #rstats code with styler? (It's feasible since styler support was removed from Positron when Air was added.) This also seems like it would be cleaner with the new equivalent of background jobs.

Prepping to talk about developing R packages next Wednesday with the Princeton R User Group! Registration info: ddss.princeton.edu/events/2025/...

NEW Cost of living, calls for change undergird Mamdani lead in NYC Voters call city unaffordable and prioritize someone bringing "needed change" over "right experience" Trump also a factor, with majorities wanting next mayor to oppose him on ICE and National Guard www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-new...

I’m at #positconf2025! Feel free to send me a message or come up to me to talk anything redistricting, R, or quarto related!

Update: As best as I can tell, this is caused by #rstats ggplot2 breaking binned scales in 4.0.0. ggredist errors because it uses palette::palette() which creates a vctrs vector. If you use a character vector of colors, it doesn't error, but the plot appears to be wrong. github.com/tidyverse/gg...

I've never seen a CRAN email mentioning the update of another #rstats package before: > The new errors are from yesterday's update of {ggplot2}. I guess it makes sense for the scale of revdep checks, as nearly 20% of other packages import ggplot2!

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

With the end of #rstats extrafont, is showtext/sysfonts now the best way to use custom fonts with ggplot? Or maybe systemfonts?

One super useful #rstats package: pushoverr (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...) Send push notifications to your phone or computer from R with: `pushover(message = ‘your code is done’)` @pushover.net has a 30 day free trial and then a one time $5 charge for a perpetual license.

Simple and lightweight #rstats package to make this available to other Home Assistant users: github.com/christopherk... Right now, it returns lists. Normally, I tidy these, but this seems wrong for the type of back-and-forth used. Please let me know if you have thoughts!

When running #rstats devtools::check(), are other people seeing: Warning message: In system2("quarto", "-V", stdout = TRUE, env = paste0("TMPDIR=", : running command '"quarto" TMPDIR=C:/... -V' had status 1 (... being a normal path) I'm seeing it on multiple Windows machines, but have Quarto

Please stop spamming #rstats with your bots Use a descriptive tag so we can can choose to follow, and not have to trawl through so much churn I can't see any option other than blocking the accounts, I'm interested in CRAN updates (and others) but gee, it should be about humans and actual ideas

There’s been a lot going on in the redistricting world these days. I want to reiterate one important finding: courts typically follow clear, written rules! christophertkenny.com/drafts/princ... There’s lot of variation, but when rules are explicit, they normally bind in court.

Using #rstats to control the lights in my apartment (ignore the cat-centric furnishings for my cats, Tibble and Coda)

Trump’s proposed rush job Census isn’t just immoral and regressive—it will harm communities across the country and compromise data quality: @chriskenny.bsky.social and I in @thehill.com today: thehill.com/opinion/camp...

Do you use tract boundaries in your research? Jake Brown, @simko.bsky.social, and I have a new working paper (osf.io/preprints/so...): Any Way You Slice It: Racial Segregation Statistics are Robust to Aggregation Bias We show that tract-level segregation is robust to MAUP using simulation methods.

Jasny, Kenny, McCartan, Simko, Wu, Zhao, Arora, Ebowe, O'Sullivan, Samarth, Imai: Gerrymandering and geographic polarization have reduced electoral competition https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15885 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15885 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.15885

A lot of talk about blue book exams www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o... and I'm surprised that they're seen abnormal. Less than a decade ago, I was taking prelim exams writing Java in pencil in blue books. Blue books are effective and were quite standard before covid. No reason not to use them more.

Updated working paper for "Individual and Differential Harm in Redistricting" with @corymccartan.com Provides an better method to evaluate electoral fairness, focused on individuals and explicit counterfactuals. One framework for party, race, ideology, religion, etc. Updated draft: osf.io/nc2x7_v2

Could that be @melodyyhuang.bsky.social's new #rstats package for sensitivity analyses? 👀

Take a look at our new working paper, which separates out changes in gerrymandering and geography to better understand bias in congressional redistricting. US geography is becoming slightly more balanced in terms of House seats, but competition is decreasing, largely due to geographic polarization.

Nice to see our research used in the NYT Upshot! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

9 days, I guess. Journal submissions still need LaTeX unfortunately...

I was so excited to see these data released that I wrote a short blog post showing how to get started in #RStats: rworks.dev/posts/anes20... Many thanks to @statsteph.bsky.social and Rebecca Powell for their review and feedback💙