Dear friends,

When I relaunched this newsletter, I promised to show up in your inbox no more than every few weeks. Here I am, right on schedule, with fireworks arithmetic, publishing dysfunction, and news from (eventually) the other side of the planet.

The math went viral. Ahead of the July 4 celebration on the National Mall, organizers promised the largest fireworks display in history: 850,000 fireworks in roughly 40 minutes. I did what any mathematician does when handed a number like that — I divided. The answer is 354 fireworks per second, which means that every time you blinked that night, you missed between 35 and 142 of them. The essay starts silly and ends serious, because all that combustion goes somewhere, and the people downwind don't get a vote. For reasons I don't fully understand, my whimsical essay exploded across the internet... like a firework. In case you missed it: Three Hundred Fifty-Four Fireworks per Second.

Meanwhile, in the ivory tower. In recent months, I've accumulated a run of scholarly publishing experiences bewildering enough that I started logging them. Inside Higher Ed published some of these: five true stories, arranged from annoying to catastrophic, followed by what the data say about who bears the cost of publishing dysfunction — disproportionately, the scholars who can least afford it — and the evidence on reforms that actually work. The journals are fine. Everything is fine.

I'm headed to Australia. I'm deeply honored to be the Dr Mandawuy Yunupingu Lecturer at AustMS 2026, the 70th annual meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, held this December at the University of Western Australia in Perth. The lecture is named for the Yolŋu musician and educator Mandawuy Yunupingu, and it exists to celebrate equity, diversity, and inclusion in mathematics and to raise the visibility of under-represented groups in the field. It can be about mathematical research, about equity, or both — you can probably guess where mine will land. Expect a full report on Australia in late 2026, except for those of you reading this from Australia, who will already know.

The book took the Page 99 Test. The novelist Ford Madox Ford famously claimed that you could judge the quality of any book from page 99 alone. Marshal Zeringue's long-running blog The Page 99 Test asks authors to run the experiment on their own books, so I opened Unlocking Justice to page 99 and landed at the gates of Rikers Island, at the start of a section called "A Brief History of Terrible Things." Does the test work? Mostly — my full verdict, including the two ways page 99 misleads, is at the link. The book was also featured at the Campaign for the American Reader, Zeringue's larger project devoted to getting more people reading more books.

The scoreboard. Unlocking Justice now has 11 reviews on Amazon and 16 ratings on Goodreads — every single one of them five stars. I don't take these ratings for granted, and I'm so grateful to everyone who has taken the time to leave them. If you've read the book and haven't yet weighed in, here's my periodic reminder that recommendation algorithms care about volume: two hundred ratings do far more to put the book in front of new readers than a dozen, even at the same (perfect!) average. Two minutes on Amazon or Goodreads remains the single most helpful thing you can do — that, and recommending the book to one person you think would love it.

Amazon · Bookshop.org · Barnes & Noble · Princeton University Press · Goodreads

What do you want? This newsletter is still young, and I'd like to shape it around what you actually want. Is there a question about data and justice you'd like me to dig into? Something in the news you wish someone would run the numbers on? Hit reply and tell me — I read every response.

With gratitude,
Chad

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