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.

Winners of The Pudding Cup, 2024: Every year, we crown our favorite data visualization passion projects (non-paid, commercial).

Thanks to all our members on Patreon for supporting us as well!

Is the Love Song Dying?

In this essay, David Mora and Michelle Jia analyze a growing sentiment: the present generation doesn’t write love songs like they used to. David and Michelle start by classifying Billboard Hot 100 hits as serenades (songs about romantic love and devotion, sung from one person to another).

Next, the authors progressively broaden the definition of a “love song” in order to see how the data might shift (e.g., does Adele’s “Someone Like You,” T-Pain’s “Buy U A Drank,” or Cardi B’s “WAP” count as love songs?).

View the project

Sitting vs. Standing Jobs

The US workforce can be divided into “sitters” (like programmers and lawyers) and “standers” (like servers and construction workers). Alvin Chang’s newest project looks at what we can learn from this labor split.

Read the Essay or Watch the 5 min. Video

The 8th annual Pudding Cup Winners

Here are the winners from this year’s submissions:

Here's to the Next 100 Sudokus, by Vivek Rao.

Votes in a Name, by Aman Bhargava & Reechik Banerjee

Battle of the Chocolate Bars, by Surbhi Bhatia

Quick asides

Have a cool essay idea that you want to make? Check out our pitch guidelines.

Want to hire our team to create data-driven, visual stories? Visit our sister studio, Polygraph.

#stuff-we-love at The Pudding

Here are some special links shared on our Friends of The Pudding slack-channel (get access via Patreon)!

• Moon - Bartosz Ciechanowski’s latest epic about the moon.

• Why so many Americans prefer sprawl to walkable neighborhoods - The Washington Post analyzes which metros offer a “15-minute city.”

• Anti-Tag Cloud - this project visualizes the most common words not to appear in popular books.

Thanks for reading!
The Pudding team