In some counties, vaccination rates increased after the pandemic, which got them past the recommended level of protection. Many more counties decreased their rates though. The Washington Post made an interactive map to see where your county stands.

I’m into the lede map that makes the decreasing counties fall into the depths below the rest of the country.

From Bandcamp:

Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.

Similarly, musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to directly connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.

Today we are fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.

I hope this works. Of course, the hard part is that it’s going to get more difficult for fans to know if a song was made by a human.

For the Minnesota Star Tribune, Jeff Hargarten and Jake Steinberg report on the growing count of federal personnel:

A potential 3,000 federal agents from ICE and CBP is equivalent to five times the manpower of the Minneapolis Police Department.

It’s close to the total headcount of sworn officers among the region’s largest 10 law enforcement agencies and equals nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents.

Good use of unit-based pie charts to show the counts and breakdowns.

What is the most middle name in the United States? Erin Davis grew curious enough to find the answers in data. For females, the most middle names are Rae, Marie, and Mae. For males, the most middle names are Lee, Kumar, and Ray.

The answers are straightforward, but finding the answers was more roundabout, because you can’t just dig into the annual baby names dataset from the Social Security Administration. Instead, Davis used voter registration data, which comes with its own challenges.

Today, we rework a chart to focus on the useful bits.

A SpaceX rocket explosion elicits images of spectacle and maybe thoughts of a lot of funds up in flames. But if you’re a pilot flying in an area suddenly defined by the FAA as a debris zone, you probably have other things on your mind. ProPublica analyzed flight data where a SpaceX Starship rocket exploded on January 16, 2025.

We compared the plane’s locations and maneuvers to the FAA’s debris zone, which was based on coordinates it released to air traffic personnel. We identified planes inside the zone during or just after the explosion in January, as well as others that appeared to take significant action to avoid the area. Planes that had just crossed the zone or flew in parallel to it were not included. This analysis may not be comprehensive of all evasive maneuvers or disruptions caused by the explosions.

For Bloomberg, Molly Smith reports on the state of government data:

But Trump has made it clear that some data collection simply didn’t align with White House “priorities” that no longer include “woke” topics such as climate change (a “hoax”) or diversity, equity and inclusion. Many of the cuts have also been aimed at data that would reflect poorly on the administration’s policies.

The administration will no longer conduct an engagement and satisfaction survey of the federal workforce after gutting its ranks, and it tried unsuccessfully to disable a website on government spending. The Social Security Administration quietly stopped publicly reporting its live call-center wait times as it was experiencing significant customer service changes and staffing reassignments. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward ending a majority of reporting requirements under a “burdensome” greenhouse gas program as the administration rolls back emissions controls. The US Department of Agriculture canceled its food security survey just days before the government shutdown disrupted food aid for tens of millions of people. The USDA also released a delayed trade report that was stripped of its usual analysis, reportedly because the comments ran counter to the president’s messaging.

A lot of people who think these takedowns are a good thing are going to experience the effects of not having enough data to see properly.

Probability expressed as a percentage is a value between 0% and 100%. If there is a 0% probability that something happens, then the thing is impossible. If there is 100% probability that something happens, then the thing is definite. This uses words to describe a number.

Now turn it around. What probability do you use to describe the words? If something is unlikely, what are the chances that something occurs? Adam Kucharski made a quiz that lets you assign probability to common words used to express probability. Then compare against what others answered.

See also: the distributions of likelihood and the CIA rendition from the 1990s.

You know the standard word search setup. There’s a grid of letters, and within that grid are hidden words to search for. Now imagine that grid of letters can grow infinitely and many people can search the grid at the same time. Luke Schaef made that game, where people can find and submit words.

Make sure to zoom out and pan. The middle of the grid is a blob, but people started to use word-finding as a drawing mechanism towards the edges, because of course they have.

In efforts to understand the hiring and firing at the beginning of the DOGE havoc in 2025, for Bloomberg, Aaron Gordon and Jason Leopold review data requested through the FOIA.

One agency immediately stands out: the Internal Revenue Service. In January 2025, the IRS hired 1,313 people. Over the next two months the agency laid off 11,000 workers, or about 11% of its workforce. And it hired zero people in February and March. What happened at the IRS amidst the DOGE-slashing effort that swept through the federal government is an extreme case of how Musk and his wrecking crew gutted agencies. The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.

Also last January, the federal government hired slightly more than 10,000 people. That didn’t decrease much in February, but the composition of hiring changed dramatically. About half the hires in January were from departments scattered across the government. The IRS accounted for one out of every nine hires. That changed in February. About 80% of the new hires were from the departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

You can download the spreadsheet from Bloomberg, which includes names, agencies, and salaries.

Sadly, receiving data from the U.S. government almost feels like an anomaly at this point. This request took about a year to process.

Based on November data released by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal workforce is 220,000 workers fewer in this administration. For the New York Times, Emily Badger, Francesca Paris, and Alicia Parlapian provides a searchable table for how each agency was affected and the year-over-year change.

Of note:

Amid all the cuts, one agency has notably swelled: Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded by about 30 percent through November, and more new hires have been announced since as the Trump administration continues to ramp up its deportation campaign.

Riffing on the photo-everyday genre, Henry Brown recorded a clip of himself saying a single word every day for a year. Stringing the clips together comes an essay on the perception of time, in the context of a year.
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When generic drug manufacturers have issues like contamination, it is difficult for those who take the medications to know if they are affected. There is no standardized way to look up the data for where the pills in your bottle came from. ProPublica made an app that makes the lookup more straightforward.

Even though generic drugs make up 90% of prescriptions dispensed in the U.S., the FDA only provides piecemeal information about them. It’s scattered across different websites with no easy way to link drugs to their manufacturers, factory locations and regulatory track records. Over many months, our journalists connected that data. In one case, ProPublica had to sue the FDA in federal court and received a partial list of factory locations.

You can use this app to connect your own medication to the manufacturer that made it, to the specific factory where it was made and to any FDA inspection reports and serious compliance violations linked to that facility that ProPublica has obtained.

With more choices for a quick bite, the market share for pizza in the United States has taken a hit over the past few years. Heather Haddon for the Wall Street Journal:

Americans still eat a lot of pizza. Pizza chains generated around $31 billion in sales from their restaurants in 2024, the market-research firm Technomic said. On any given day, around one in 10 Americans will partake of a slice, according to the Agriculture Department. Young people drive much of the consumption.

Pizza’s dominance in American restaurant fare is declining, however. Among different cuisines, it ranked sixth in terms of U.S. sales in 2024 among restaurant chains, down from second place during the 1990s, Technomic said.

Remember when the only delivery option was pizza?

Here are tools to use, resources to learn from, and data to analyze.

NeatoCal is a JavaScript-based calendar implementation that you can print on a single page. Play with the code or use the live demo with parameters for various encodings and layouts. Then print the one-pager from your browser. Plan your entire year. Done.

To highlight challenges in other countries, Giving What We Can imagined a birth lottery to see how you might start life from birth. Spin the globe and see how the country you land on compares against your own in terms of life expectancy, income, and education.

The metrics, sourced from Our World in Data, feed into the Human Development Index, which is used to estimate if the starting point in one country is more difficult than that of another.

Stating the obvious, the U.S. president has made lucrative business deals while in office. The scale of these deals is more difficult to figure out. For the New York Times, Lazaro Gamio and Amy Schoenfeld Walker break down the network between the president, his family, and others in office.

While some might consider this a conflict of interest, others clearly see opportunity. Good times.

See also: the Wall Street Journal’s network buildout.

With a few hours left in my year over here, it seemed like a good time to reflect. Here’s what we did in 2025.