Hello subscribers to The Pudding!

It’s 2025, and we’ve got some amazing projects planned for the year. We’ve published a few thing since our last email, so let’s catch you up:

Is the Love Song Dying? In this essay, we look at over 5,000 Billboard hits and quantify how love songs have changed over the years.

Sitting vs. Standing Jobs [5 min. video and a interactive essay]: the Flowing Data blog describes this essay as, “Some jobs require a lot of standing, crouching, and climbing, whereas other jobs require little movement and you sit all day, turning into a sloth-like creature that gets up sometimes to eat and go to the toilet. I’m not projecting, you are.” This project visualizes the spectrum of sitting and standing jobs.

Hello! We’re back in your inboxes because we’re on a publishing streak, with many new projects to share!

• [Essay] Do you know about the game of crokinole? Nope? Neither did most of our team until Russell introduced us to this mashup of shuffleboard and curling. Learn about this tabletop game while playing our crokinole simulator.

• [Essay] To show how difficult it is to get abortion care in the U.S., we built a maze for each state where the complexity is based on the state’s abortion policies. Work through all 51 mazes.

• [Essay] For decades, NBA fans had it easy: Teams wore white at home and colors when away. But today, teams are switching it up. Tyler Machado looks at which teams buck tradition and which ones embrace trends using data from the 2023-24 season.

• [8-min Video] We spend a significant part of our lives waiting — from ordering coffee, to snagging Taylor Swift/Beyoncé tickets, to navigating airport security lines. Uri Bram and Mureji Fatunde explain why queues are so tricky.

• If you haven’t already: take this survey and help us sort 35 K-pop artists into generations. We’ll make a story with the data!

But first, we’re excited to bring back…

Hello! Welcome to our first newsletter on a new email service called Buttondown! We will no longer be emailing from Substack, so you’ll be unsubscribed from there.

Here are our new projects to share!

• [Essay] We looked at a decade of fanfic couples. See who gets shipped and why. Using 11 years of relationSHIP data from AO3, we break down why fanfic is hella gay and goes well beyond the source material.

• [Help us collect data] Organize these K-pop groups by generation, and we'll make an article using the results.

• [Essay] See how modern stats are reshaping baseball’s batting lineups.

• [Interactive Map] There are 59,507 outdoor basketball courts in the U.S.A. Explore satellite imagery of all of them. This project stitches together aerial basketball court images into a single mosaic for you to explore. We posted a behind-the-scenes to Patreon too.

Thanks for the recent Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!

Here are our new projects to share!

• [Essay] Can an AI make a data-driven, visual story? Technically… yes. We review and grade what Claude and ChatGPT can create, and we offer a peak behind The Pudding’s story-making process.

• [Essay] Is Sleep Training Harmful? Contributor Tom Vaillant examined the social media and medical discourse surrounding infant sleep training to answer this hotly debated question among parents.

• [Essay] Who killed the world? An exploration of how sci-fi films have changed in the last 70-some years. You can also watch the video version (5 min)!

Thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe! Special shout-out to all the recent Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!

The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

Here are our new projects to share!

• [Essay] Can an AI make a data-driven, visual story? Technically… yes. We review and grade what Claude and ChatGPT can create, and we offer a peak behind The Pudding’s story-making process.

• [Essay] Is Sleep Training Harmful? Contributor Tom Vaillant examined the social media and medical discourse surrounding infant sleep training to answer this hotly debated question among parents.

• [Essay + Video] Who killed the world? An exploration of how sci-fi films have changed in the last 70-some years. You can also watch the video version (5 min)!

The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

Here are our new projects to share!

• [Essay] How Will Your City Feel in the Future? We created charts that depict the climate classification of 70 global cities and how they shift with climate change.

• The Longest Collaborative Flipbook Animation Ever: for a few weeks earlier this year, readers took turns tracing the previous person’s drawing to make a flipbook-style animation, resulting in 22,454 drawings. See the flipbook or watch this 11-minute recap video that discusses what we learned.

• [Essay] Failures to Act + [Podcast] The Youth Development Center: We analyzed 1,281 court documents of alleged child abuse in New Hampshire’s youth facilities and created a visual essay with New Hampshire Public Radio, the organization behind shows such as Bear Brook and The 13th Step.

The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

We have *three* new updates that we are excited to share with you!

• [Essay] How Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list changed from 2003 to 2020. We examined every album and voter from Rolling Stone’s three-decade survey.

• [Interactive] The Flipbook Experiment: Help draw the longest flipbook animation ever. It’s like the telephone game, but visual.

• [6-min Video] Watch hundreds of teenagers grow up into adults and see how their childhood experiences affect their life outcomes: Alvin Chang uses longitudinal survey data to trace the experiences of hundreds of teenagers.

As always, thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe and allowing us to share our work with your inbox. Special shout-out to Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!

The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

We have *three* new updates that we are excited to share with you!

• Exploring National Anthem Performances: we isolated the vocals of 138 US National Anthem performances and compared each performer’s pitch to the standard. Who is the ultimate diva?

• How Spotify’s expanding catalog reflects 2023's musical frontier: we look through Spotify’s database of 6,000 genres.

• Join Our 2024 Cohort: we created a summer fellowship for current college or graduate-level students or recent-grads to author a project on The Pudding. Applications are open!

As always, thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe and allowing us to share our work with your inbox. Special shout-out to Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!

The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

We have *four* new projects we are excited to share with you!

• What Does a Happily Ever After Look Like? — We looked at over 1,400 romance novel covers from 2011 to 2023 to find out how the visuals have changed.

• 24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic — Watch 24 hours of an American day, and see the invisible crisis hiding in plain sight.

• A Clock Where the Time is Made of News Headlines — Exactly what it sounds like!

• A Clock Where the Time is the Population of a US Place — Also exactly what it sounds like!

As always, thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe and allowing us to share our work with your inbox. Special shout-out to Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!

The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

Jan here, reporting for newsletter duty! We have *four* new projects we are excited to share with you.

• Women are superstars on stage, but still rarely get to write songs — We looked at songwriting credits since 1958 from Top 5 hits in the Billboard Hot 100.

• Mapping Record-High Heat in U.S. Cities — A rework of an older project, we’re tracking how many days it’s been since a city had a record-high temperature.

• A Clock Where the Time is in a Song Title — Exactly what it sounds like!

• A Clock Where the Time is Mentioned on YouTube — Also exactly what it sounds like!

As always, thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe and allowing us to share our work with your inbox. Special shout-out to Patreon subscribers and paid Substack subscribers; your support means a lot!

The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

Happy Summer! We have *four* new projects we are excited to share with you.

• They Won’t Play a Lady-O on Country Radio - Examining back-to-back plays by gender, race, and sexual orientation

• Wonky - An exploration of rhythm and grooves that break the rules

• Asterisking NBA Champions - The official haters guide for salty fans

• Pass The Mic - A browser extension to visualize how much each person is talking in Google Meet

As always, thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe and allowing us to share our work with your inbox. Special shout-out to Patreon subscribers and paid-Substack subscribers; your support means a lot!

The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

Hey everyone! We have a new set of projects that we wanted to share! Read ahead for a brief summary, or jump in now:

• The search for my kimchi - “I loved my grandmother's fresh kimchi. But as I aged, tasting the defining flavor of my childhood became elusive.”

• How companies make it difficult to subscribe - “I unsubscribed from 16 online services and documented the ways companies made it challenging.”

• (With Vox) How Russia’s invasion transformed one Ukrainian city - A year of bombs in the borderland

The Pudding is a journal for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

In this issue, we try to make learning about statistical anomalies (in the NBA) a little more fun, see if data can aid the discussion around US city naming conundrums, and test your US geography expertise.

Thank you so much for subscribing, and you can also support us on Patreon, which gives you access to our patron-only Slack channel and merch!

The Pudding is a journal for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

In this issue, we share details on our upcoming live stream game, try to define literary canon according to college syllabi, and revisit some past projects.

As always, our work is brought to you in part by our Patreon supporters, whom we never take for granted. You should also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.

The Pudding is a journal for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

In this issue, we explore the hidden forces that shape our lives, including the neighborhoods we grow up in, our emotional undercurrents, and the strange math that underlies wealth inequality.

The Pudding is a journal for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

Craving some year-end data visualization inspiration? In this issue, we share 2022’s award-winning projects. We start with the winners of our 6th annual Pudding Cup, then share some exciting awards of our own.

The Pudding is a journal for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.

In this issue, we put a spotlight on people and things that often get relegated to the shadows, including censored media in China, informal street vendors in Mexico City, and the signature sneakers of the WNBA.

But first, we celebrate the launch of our very own game, words against strangers.

The Pudding is a digital publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects like How Ali Wong Structures Stand-Up, How Bad is Your Spotify?, or Women’s Pockets are Inferior.

This issue is devoted to the gods of different arenas, including music industry overlords, TikTok idols, sneakerhead icons and the Aztec pantheon.

We’ll also introduce you to our latest team member and celebrate a recent win.

In this edition of The Pudding newsletter, we’ll introduce you to four new stories that shed light on some of the things we take for granted. Whether they’re things we’re overly familiar with (like faces on our banknotes or our day-to-day weather), or stuff we simply fail to question (like research methods and pathways to success), we believe that with a bit more data and context, you’ll start to see the world around you a little differently.

Speaking of seeing things differently, did we mention we’re now on TikTok (@the_pudding)? See what happens when contributor David Mora uses our population data story to better understand some of the major metropolises around the globe.

As always, our work is brought to you in part by our Patreon supporters, whom we never take for granted.