Jan Diehm

Jan Diehm is a Sr. Journalist-Engineer at The Pudding. She appreciates the finer things in life: LEGO sets, southern delicacies like pimento cheese and fried green tomatoes, and vintage Britney Spears. You can follow her on the socials or check out her website. She has worked on 22 stories to date. Explore them all below.

Stories

We scraped the web to track one of the internet’s oldest images — one that lives on without the subject’s consent.

October 2021
A story about hearing yourself in same-gender pop lyrics for the first time and tracking it with data ever since.

June 2021
What do you do when your friends are sick of hearing about your breakup? Use a supercomputer to find a happier ending.

March 2021
Candles and LEDs don’t pay for themselves. We’ll demonstrate just exactly how much work goes into warding off the dark.

December 2020
Crosswords are known for being too old, too white, and too male. We backed that up with data.

November 2020
Take the quiz: Can you identify when these photos were taken? It may not be as easy as it sounds.

October 2020
We examined 271 presidential candidate branding designs from 1968–2020. Here’s who goes beyond the red, WHITE, and blue.

August 2020
Using baby name data, we found the names that could be at risk of becomming future "Karens" in 10, 20, and 30 years.

June 2020
Do you smell what we’re cooking? It’s stories, facts, and pixel art drawings of over 200 masked wrestlers.

May 2020
When it comes to sanitizing lyrics, where does Kidz Bop draw the line? (This was pre-WAP though; now all bets are off.)

April 2020
From beehives, to afros, to bumpits: we looked at 30,000 yearbook photos to officially crown the "Big Hair Era."

November 2019
Do you "lol?" Or "haha?’ Or "hehe?" We charted the usage, evolution, and perception of digital laughter.

October 2019
We’ve devised pub crawl routes between UK watering holes of the same name. One Red Lion down, 338 to go. Cheers!

October 2019
Headlines say millennials killed napkins, marriage, and Applebees. We say, "you’re welcome." What’s next for this group?

September 2019
Since the 1950s, hyphenated last names in pro-sports have been on the rise. The WNBA leads the way, as it so often does.

May 2019
We looked at 19 years of covers to see Vogue represents women of all shades. You can guess how this went.

April 2019
We looked at every political party platform between 1840 and 2016 to find how often women’s issues appeared in the text.

March 2019
We created a brief history of the past 100 years from New York Times headlines. And yes, there are word clouds.

December 2018
Watch as the design of the iconic Air Jordan morphs from its the first release in 1985 to the present.

September 2018
We went there. A data investigation into the travesty that is women’s pockets.

August 2018
We mapped how "gayborhoods" are divided by gender. It’s true: men are from Chelsea, women are from Park Slope.

June 2018
Which athletes qualify as one-hit wonders? We charted the greatest single-season anomalies in the last 30 years.

April 2018