Hello subscribers to The Pudding, as well as our special supporters on Patreon.
For today’s newsletter: two new stories, a tutorial, and a one-question survey/chance to win some free merch!
Onomatopoeia Odyssey: An interactive essay that analyzes animal sounds across different languages to learn about their similarities and differences.
The Middle Ages: A 7 min. video + an interactive essay where we look at survey data of hundreds of kids to find out why middle school sucks.
No-Code Charts: A blog post where Jan walks you through how to recreate different charts from our recent stories without coding!
One-Question Survey: We need your help! Answer this quick question and get the chance to win something from our merch collection.
Thanks to all our members on Patreon for supporting us as well!
Onomatopoeia Odyssey
This is a project from our 2024 student cohort by Vivian Li. It started with a question: why do animals sometimes have different sounds in different languages?
In this story, Vivian takes us through a few different animal sounds (cat, duck, and pig) to explore their sonic and cultural differences using phonetic comparisons.
The Middle Ages
Middle school sucks, and millions of American kids agree. In this piece, Alvin Chang has a conversation with the middle schoolers on the screen, who tell us how they feel about this awkward era between elementary school and high school.
These blinking faces are representative of about 40 million kids who were surveyed over the past three years. Throughout the story, we see them evolve from giddy elementary school kids to struggling middle schoolers. They want to know why this is happening and whether things will get better.
Ready the essay or watch the video (7 min.)
No-Code Charts Tutorials
While the type of projects we publish at The Pudding require a lot of technical skill, the individual pieces of them aren’t as intimidating or insurmountable as you think. You can make cool charts without any code! We’ll show you how with these 4 video tutorials.
One-Question Survey
In the 1980s, there was a study that produced surprising results about our predictive tendencies. We’re conducting a similar study today. Please take the survey and share with others so we can get some good data! A few random people will score some free merch, if you need the extra incentive.
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)!
Thanks for reading!
The Pudding team