3 new projects: 1/3 an Algorithmic Redistricting Atlas. Explore congressional redistricting across enacted, simulated, and optimized maps. It has data for the last 5 presidential elections, and you can swing the national baseline.

Is air formatting broken for tribbles at the moment? It seems to be inserting spaces inconsistently, almost at-random

If you do record linkage in #rstats, I'd love your feedback on irelink: Fast Probabilistic Record Linkage. It is a port of Python's splink package, rewritten with a clean, pipeable R interface. All of the magic happens in a database backend (default is DuckDB) so it's incredibly fast.

This is also not quite true. Empirically, states with independent commissions or nonpartisan drawers produce maps that are at or near the median simulation on partisan + racial demographics. Because of that, it's reasonable to treat the median as a forecast for a drawer following only certain rules

This is not accurate! Just like polling, we can randomly sample maps in a representative way, and understand typical maps without looking at every one. We have mathematical proofs that these algorithms produce representative samples if run long enough.

Unfortunately some inaccurate info in this thread. The point of the NYT sims was to see what typical maps drawn without the VRA would look like. But the maps Stephen draws incorporate VRA compliance. Also wrong info on the algorithms which I will say more about separately

One of the joys of open source: Seeing the NYT use your #rstats packages www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/u...

Quarto Typst Render 0.13 ships 'typst_define()' for R and Python. Push polars DataFrames, lists, scalars from a knitr or jupyter session into every '{typst}' cell, accessible as '#typst_define.<name>'. github.com/mcanouil/quarto-typst-render #Quarto #Typst #rstats #python #dataviz

Introducing dais: a Rust-based PDF presenter tool. Present PDF slides (eg, Beamer) in a PowerPoint-like interface. Full drawing control, navigation tools, live text boxes, and more: christophertkenny.com/posts/2026-0...

Now with a short blog post on the Princeton DDSS engineering website: princeton-ddss.github.io/notes/cran-g... This increase is driven by solo devs with prior #rstats packages on CRAN!

Submission to CRAN #rstats through May 7th. Looks like the LLMs are gaining speed

Given the Callais decision, resharing our (w @corymccartan.com) "Individual and Differential Harm in Redistricting" piece which tries to tackle estimating group harm, including separating partisan and racial effects of maps... osf.io/preprints/so... (conditionally accepted at Nature Human Behavior)

The Positron release from last week is *substantially* faster than the March version on startup. Highly recommend updating!

I agree, Claude. It is weird that case_match() was deprecated in dplyr 1.2.0.

A proof-of-concept: CI for Quarto extensions! Automatically install and run your templates weekly, so you know when #quartopub updates might break something. Renders results to a Quarto site, so you can preview outputs: christophertkenny.com/template-gal... Source: github.com/christopherk...

And another Quarto announcement; I've alluded to it before, but we're making it "official". We've started work on Quarto 2. The blog post has an overview: quarto.org/docs/blog/po... We'll share more in future blog posts, but here's what you can expect from the Quarto 2 dev effort: (1/)

"It'll be a quick PR to fix a small feature gap" ... "might as well do it correctly" ...

Updated Positron + Quarto + Quarto VSCode extension at the same time and the preview doesn't work anymore because it appends --output-directory, which is invalid in most cases... Codex followed the ctrl+shift+k -> found the issue -> fixed the extension's typescript so it works! Pretty impressive

#rstats I'm glad to announce Jarl 0.5.0! Jarl is a very fast R linter, written in Rust. This release brings many improvements and fixes. See the blog post: www.etiennebacher.com/posts/2026-0... And the full changelog: jarl.etiennebacher.com/changelog 🧵 to highlight some features below (1/4)

And very interesting to see the growth of the tidyverse, Rcpp, and ropensci in the last decade by maintainer/author Hard to think of #rstats without the tidyverse Note: Author parsing is a little difficult and there may be some undercounts! Lines end at last new package author/maintainer role.

CRAN is on track for an all time year in terms of #rstats package submissions:

29 years of #rstats community knowledge was sitting in hard-to-search pipermail archives. So I built a more modern home for it. Introducing the R Mailing List Archives: 631,000+ messages from 32 lists, fully searchable and available as open data. r-mailing-lists.thecoatlessprofessor.com

Doing a lot of testing of AI agents with my team these days. Pulled together a new package, wf, which helps install and manage agent skills from within #rstats (A great time to be at Princeton DDSS; our team has an intro to Claude workshop today and an intro to Posit Assistant workshop next week!)

Doing some testing with codex in #rstats. It seems quite a bit behind Claude Code... Does anyone know if there is a clean way to give codex access to `.libPaths()` (ie, C:/Users/chris/AppData/Local/R/win-library/4.5 AND C:/Program Files/R/R-4.5.2/library) without giving it full powershell access?

I have been wanting a solution like this for years. Now with Claude Code it is surprisingly easy to build it. Added WebR to run R code, Zotero plugin, a Diff viewer (can export all changes between submission and resubmission), basically ready to be used in our lab!

If you use #QuartoPub for any PDF documents for teaching and you need to meet impending PDF accessibility rules, upgrade to v1.9, add format: typst: pdf-standard: ua-1 to the YAML front matter, and it'll work!

Here's a quick guide to setting up an R LSP for Claude Code in #rstats: christophertkenny.com/posts/2026-0... Note that it uses the `languageserver` package at the moment, since I don't believe ark is exposed for a standalone mode yet.

News for #RStats folks who use RStudio and are interested in AI, via @posit.co: "AI in RStudio is here. We’ve embedded a specialized agent, Posit Assistant, directly into RStudio, transforming the IDE into a powerful, context-aware collaborator for data analysis." It's a $20/mo subscription.

Over the weekend, I started collecting/organizing a list of cool #rstats skills for LLMs at github.com/christopherk.... Please open an issue or PR in any awesome additions you see! Includes a section for helpful posts like @ivelasq3.bsky.social's⬇️

One weird pattern from playing with Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI: Claude Code loves to use bash and python, even when working on R code (and then gets confused since there is no 🐍installed) Copilot, with the same models, seems to naturally know to use R and powershell

Getting ready for the 2026 mid-terms, every PlanScore analysis page moving forward will now feature a new scenario adjustment tool to make it easy to change, view, and share potential outcomes that may differ from 2024 medium.com/planscore/pl... Try with this NC map: planscore.org/plan.html?20...

Redistricting Reforms Reduce Gerrymandering by Constraining Partisan Actors is now forthcoming in the APSR! We use a game theoretic treatment and continuous DiD(iD) to show when redistricting reforms work with @corymccartan.com, @simko.bsky.social, Emma Ebowe, Michael Zhao, and Kosuke Imai

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/