The Pudding

Have a data story you're obsessed with telling? We want to hear it. We accept freelance pitches year-round and review them monthly. We commission just a few custom visual essays each quarter, so we’re looking for ideas that perfectly hit our creative sweet spot. What Makes a Good Story? Is it an argument, or just a topic? A good story has a thesis that invites debate. What assumption are you challenging? If your premise doesn't spark a 10-minute conversation, it’s not ready yet.

I believe there have only been five truly ethical NBA champions in the last 25 years: teams that don’t need an asterisk by their title. This is a chart of every NBA champion since 2001, ranked by how ethical their title was. (Don’t worry about the numbers yet, we’ll get there). Standing on their own are the 2015 Warriors, by far the least ethical champion of the century by my measure. They got lucky, facing multiple opponents missing important players.

Explore the Buttolph Collection from the New York Public Library's archive of historic menus

What do America's earliest restaurant menus teach us about America?

Lawn Mowing Experiment This is a game about mowing a lawn as efficiently as possible. And a small experiment. Play just two rounds, and then we’ll break down the findings when our story drops in a few weeks. Let’s do it

Once upon a time in the 1960s, an Asian boy and girl met at college. We’ll call them Henry and Mary. A few years later, during an unusually rainy season in January, they started dating. Then a few years after that, they got married. Eventually they had two kids, bought a single-family home, and built successful careers. Decades later, in 2017, Henry was asked how his relationship was. He said it was excellent. This is the template of a love story that many of us dream of living.

Early Childhood Minji and I first met when we were nine years old, at a Korean language school that operated out of a high school on Saturday mornings. We were kids in the late '90s in the suburbs of Detroit, where hanging out meant going to each other's houses doing nothing. For us, though, we had a familiar routine: drink aloe, eat Korean snacks, and sit cross-legged on the floor of her family's living room while listening to BoA's "No. 1" on repeat.

Data and Methods For this project, we focused on the most recognizable form: classic "as ___ as ___" similes. Those give us a clean ground (e.g., “white”) paired with a clean vehicle (e.g., “snow”) which makes them easier to count, compare, and cluster. I used a natural language library to scan grammatical patterns looking for the simile form, restricted to the top 500 most-used adjectives according to this word frequency corpus. A lot of time was spent filtering out junk.

Thank you to my village. Thank you to my husband and family who’ve held me during each failed cycle. Thank you to the nurses, clinical writers, receptionists and the doctors at Generation Next Fertility, the clinic I found after some terrible experiences elsewhere. I didn’t catch the names of every nurse or staffer there, but would like to give a shoutout to Abigail, Kendall, Yamika, Abigail, Jennifer, Sophia, Alex, Elizabeth and Joana.