This post was originally published on my blog on October 25th, 2011. Near the end of this summer, I was asked by the publishers of Popular Science magazine to produce a visualization piece that explored the archive of their publication. PopSci has a history that spans almost 140 years, so…

This post was originally published on June 10, 2011 on my blog. Since that link is pretty hard to find, I’m re-publishing it here. In late October, 2009, I received an e-mail from Jake Barton from Local Projects, titled plainly ‘Potential Freelance Job’. I read the e-mail, and responded with…

Every day birders from all around the world make checklists. They tally tanagers, count crows, iterate ibis and enumerate emus. Just this month, people will submit more than one million lists to eBird, the world’s most popular citizen science platform. A million checklists a month! That’s a lot of counting…

A totally non-comprehensive list of stuff for the bird-inclined — If you have birder in your life and you yourself are not a birder, you might be starting to sweat a little. It’s a high-risk proposal to pick a gift for someone who’s really into something that you’re not really into. Here’s a list of suggestions that might just help…

Nick Russo is wearing one sock and holding a small dinosaur. For a few moments it is settled in his arms, wings held tightly against its body…

A new generation of post-pandemic birders can change the way we see our cities — If you were to wake up tomorrow from sixteen months of fairy-tale sleep, you’d probably have a few questions. What the heck is a delta variant? What happened to restaurant menus? When did all of my friends become birdwatchers? On the last Monday in May of this year, 1,046 birders…

This morning, my family and I walked over the Manhattan bridge to the Lower East Side, to write two names on the sidewalk in chalk: Joseph Wilson and Fannie Lansner. Both twenty-two when they died, both workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, both Russian Immigrants, both living in the same…

The Mueller report is 203,028 words long. Here’s a much shorter version, centered around its primary subject. The President said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” The President had not directed Flynn to discuss sanctions with Kislyak. The President told White House…

Last month, IBM ran a minute-long ad during the Oscars, titled ‘Let’s Put Smart To Work.’ Backed by a dramatic string score, the spot features a sequence of famous people — singer and actress Janelle Monae, spelling bee champion Akash Vukoti, Open Source software advocate Bruce Perens, Me Too movement…