2025-11-14 22:15:08
As you might imagine, the word “democracy” has been mentioned in Congressional speeches many times, but over the past several years it has grown much more common to speak about democracy as under threat. For the Pudding, Alvin Chang analyzed speeches in the Congressional Record dating back to 1880, highlighting the abrupt shift in sentiment.
Tags: Alvin Chang, democracy, Pudding, text
2025-11-14 19:32:54
Jon Bois of Secret Base is working on a documentary that covers the history of charging the mound in Major League Baseball. Data had to be collected manually, and Bois has shared the results.
Behind each and every one of my documentary series is a mountain of research documents, notes, and links that never see the light of day. This time around, I’ve decided not only to make my primary research doc open to everybody, but to do so while I’m still working on the project. […]
That’s all yours. It belongs to you. Browse it, click the links to review the tape, download it, whatever you wanna do. If you’re so inclined, you can even use it as a jumping-off point to produce a story of your own.
Fields include level of altercation from verbal to full physical takedowns and the level of teammate involvement.
This is a very important dataset.
Tags: baseball, mound, Secret Base
2025-11-13 22:55:57
Drawing inspiration from early cartographers who had to make maps with limited information, Outside Text tested models on world map output, also with limited information.
In the earliest renditions of the world, you can see the world not as it is, but as it was to one person in particular. They’re each delightfully egocentric, with the cartographer’s home most often marking the Exact Center Of The Known World. But as you stray further from known routes, details fade, and precise contours give way to educated guesses at the boundaries of the creator’s knowledge. It’s really an intimate thing.
If there’s one type of mind I most desperately want that view into, it’s that of an AI. So, it’s in this spirit that I ask: what does the Earth look like to a large language model?
Prompting “draw a world map” would have yielded obvious results, so to test, a grid was entered, and the probability of land in each cell was calculated.
Tags: Large Language Model, mapping, Outside Text
2025-11-13 22:06:54
Hi everyone. Nathan here. I write to you from the United States, where we make questionable decisions about what is good and useful in the short- and long-term. In this week’s Process, we see how such decision-making affects our choices in the much more benign arena of chart-making.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2025-11-12 21:56:21
G. Elliot Morris, for Strength in Numbers, breaks down the shift towards Democrat in the 2025 governor election compared to the 2024 presidential election.
Note the pronounced shift away from Republicans among the groups that powered Trump’s 2024. Non‑white, lower-income, and young voters all shifted toward Democrats at above-average rates. GOP vote margin fell by over 40 points among Asian American voters, 25 points among Hispanic/Latino voters, and 26 points among 18–29‑year‑olds. White voters moved only five points, underscoring that most of the swing came from the very constituencies some analysts claimed were “realigning” right last year. The gender gap persisted but both halves moved left: men by 17 points and women by 29
I think we’re getting a pattern in these swings.
Tags: demographics, election, G. Elliott Morris, margin
2025-11-12 20:58:07
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prevents states from discriminating by race or color to prevent voting. Legally speaking, it’s the only thing stopping extreme gerrymandering, as described by Nate Cohn and Jonah Smith:
So if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 2, as it is considering, any equally populated House district is fair game, at least as far as federal law is concerned. There would be no federal law that might deter a 38-0 Texas congressional map that unanimously elected Republicans, or a 52-0 map in California with nothing but Democrats.
To be clear, such extreme gerrymanders are unlikely for a host of reasons. But the point isn’t that these two extreme maps are likely; it’s that they might soon be legal. And while states may not go this far, they may nonetheless be tempted to push toward more extreme maps than ever before.
Why does this not seem like an impossible scenario.
Tags: elections, gerrymandering, government, New York Times
