Aug. 15, 2025, 2:27 p.m.
The Pudding's Latest: Chopping onions, reading the city, kids' book animals
The Pudding
Hello subscribers to The Pudding, as well as our special supporters on Patreon.
We’ve got 3 new stories coming at you!
Onions are like ogres. In that they both have layers and they both make me cry.
How many times does the word “pizza” appear on NYC streets? Hint: It’s more than 1, and less than 111,291.
Bears will be boys. And I’m not just saying that because they will ghost you all winter long.
Let’s jump into it!
Dicing an onion (the mathematically optimal way)
Do you like to cook? Are you a huge freaking nerd? Are you my friend Jeremy, who brought his sous vide machine on vacation so he could cook the optimal steak? If you said yes to any of the above, this story is for you.
With a little help from geometry, contributor Andrew Aquino tackles a question that has bedeviled chefs for millennia: how can you dice an onion into pieces of equal shape and size?
Grab your protractor and your sharpest knife — today is the first day of the rest of your life.
If you like this story, check out these other math explainers: The Infinite Monkey Theorem Experiment, The Birthday Paradox, The Birthday Effect
NYC’s Urban Textscape
If you printed out all of the visible text in New York City in 12-point-font and laid it in a straight line, it would stretch all the way to the moon and back one billion times!
Okay, I made that up, but there is A LOT of visible text in NYC, and thanks to media artist Yufeng Zhao, you can now search through 138 million snippets of text captured by Google Street View.
Using Zhao’s database, our resident mapping connoisseur, Matt, set out to decode the urban lexicon of traffic regulations, graffiti, and business signage. Among his findings:
“Fuhgeddaboudit” IS a real word
Sabrett is the top dog (haha) when it comes to hot dogs
You’re always under surveillance
If you like this story, take a gander at these guys: Human Terrain, B-ball Courts, and Local Travel Guide
Kids’ Book Animals
In my youth, I was a voracious reader, and many of my early beliefs were informed by didactic children’s books: The Sneetches taught me that it was okay to be different; The Very Hungry Caterpillar showed me the importance of hitting my daily protein goal; If You Give A Mouse A Cookie illustrated the dangers of government handouts.
According to contributor Melanie Walsh, kids’ books don’t need an overt morale to quietly structure one’s worldview. Walsh conducted a study using 300 popular children’s books with animal protagonists to the answer the question: Which animals do we gender, and why?
If you like this story, read our other essays about gender: She Giggles, He Gallops, Songwriters, How Men & Women Are Defined In Literature
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 (get access via Patreon)!
For several years, music data writer Chris Dalla Riva has been compiling a massive spreadsheet about the Billboard Hot 100 #1 hits. He just released a book about the data, which you can pre-order now. It includes lots of fun charts, like this one:
Draw A Fish, fifteen.games
Moving Archives, Google Arts & Culture
Weather Watching, Riley Walz
Thanks for reading!
Kevin & The Pudding team