Russell Samora

Stories

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  Welcome to Crokinole, the greatest game you’ve never heard of.

  October 2024

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  We had an AI attempt to make a data-driven story like we do at The Pudding.

  July 2024

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  We analyzed 1,281 court documents of alleged child abuse in New Hampshire youth facilities. Here’s what they show.

  June 2024

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  The results from making a crowd-sourced flipbook animation.

  March 2024

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  A series of experimental clocks that connect data to time.

  August 2023

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  This is not a story. We made a browser extension to visualize how much each person is talking in Google Meet.

  June 2023

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  Introducing CRUTCH, Our New Metric For Asterisking NBA Champions.

  June 2023

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  We made a short daily photo location guessing game that is a mashup of GeoGuessr and Wordle.

  April 2023

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  Portland, Maine, or Oregon? We calculated what place someone is most likely referring to, depending on where they are.

  March 2023

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  We used statistics to find out which NBA players have had the greatest unexpected performances.

  February 2023

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  One random person a day gets the chance to play against the internet in a game of words. Can you beat them?

  September 2022

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  We watched 100 episodes of The Big Bang Theory to figure out what the government in China censors, and why.

  August 2022

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  We’re tracking heat records in 400 U.S. cities, and you can look up your city.

  May 2022

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  We found this cool study about age and randomness, but we think it is flawed. Can you help us reproduce it?

  April 2022

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  Do movies with more coughs win Best Picture? A near flawless expulsion-based model that predicts a win for Dune.

  March 2022

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  What could have been for your favorite NBA team? A data-driven revisionist history of the NBA draft.

  February 2022

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  We tried to win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest by making AI-generated captions.

  January 2022

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  We investigated 200 crackers to learn about food allergies and labelling. Warning: may contain troubling results.

  December 2021

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  For groups to succeed, sometimes one person will shoulder more than their fair share of the work. Just ask LeBron James.

  August 2021

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  A visual history of Rickrolling — millions of comments, posts, and links — that’s never gonna let you down.

  July 2021

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  How many artists overshadow their band after going solo? We crunched the numbers.

  April 2021

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

  March 2021

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  We tracked every time someone says "cool" in community. Cool. Cool. Cool.

  January 2021

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  Clue: We crunched the data on this controversial cookie and condiment crossword clue. Answer: Oreo.

  January 2021

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

  November 2020

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  These playable mini crosswords let you get a feel for who gets included (and excluded) as clues and answers in puzzles.

  November 2020

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  To help you clear out your inbox, we’ve compiled a data-driven newsletter of popular links in other newsletters.

  July 2020

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

  May 2020

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  What happens when you combine music, a monkey, Joe Rogan, and probability? You get this experiment.

  April 2020

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  Do authors write where they know? We calculated the distance between where authors lived and where their books were set.

  February 2020

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  Will saying sorry save your reputation? We quantified the lasting impact of a YouTube appology and controversy.

  January 2020

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

  October 2019

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  Our 2019 hipster summer reading list will introduce you to an artisanal selection of obscure books before they’re cool.

  June 2019

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  We made a map that replaces UK city names with their most Wikipedia’ed resident.

  June 2019

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  We made a map that replaces US city names with their most Wikipedia’ed resident.

  May 2019

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  The NBA has a defensive three seconds problem. We tracked how often players are camped in the paint.

  May 2019

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

  March 2019

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  Can you spell the hardest names in the NBA? Or will you miss and spell H-O-R-S-E?

  March 2019

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  Do high school basketball stars live up to the hype? Here’s how many find success in the NBA.

  March 2019

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  Think Gyllenhaal is a hard name to spell? It gets worse. Here are the many ways to misspell big names in pop culture.

  February 2019

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  These are the countries that have most preoccupied Americans since 1900, according to New York Times headlines.

  December 2018

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  Because you just can’t get enough of them, we found every boy band to chart the Hot 100 since 1980.

  November 2018

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  From Cardi B to Carson Wentz: we charted the path to fame from Wikipedia pageviews.

  October 2018

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  Here’s who was the most popular person on Wikipedia ever day in 2018.

  September 2018

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  What Wikipedia pageviews tell us about how famous people are remembered after they die. RIP.

  August 2018

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  A supercut of the most-viewed NBA plays from 2017–18. Warning: this video contains a high dosage of LeBron footage.

  May 2018

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

  April 2018

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  Your birthday twin is probably reading this right now. We take on the birthday paradox.

  April 2018

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  We watched Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra too many times and charted out how she built the routine around a laughter climax.

  February 2018

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  We can all agree that drain hair is gross. But it’s a thin line between love and hate for more than 3,000 other topics.

  December 2017

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  How would you define an NBA superteam? We couldn’t decide so we built this tool to give you the power.

  October 2017

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  In 2017, we mapped the cities and places with the worst access to abortion based on driving times.

  September 2017

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  Men "gallop" and women "giggle," at least according to the gendered tropes found in 2,000 scripts.

  August 2017

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  What’s best for animals in aquariums? We look to the past & present to gauge the future of captive whales and dolphins.

  July 2017

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  A story about how film plots mirror (or shape) historical events.

  June 2017

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  What’s the most timeless NBA play? We turn to YouTube views to determine which have the most replay value.

  May 2017

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  Let’s raise a pint to the microbrew capitals of the U.S. Cheers!

  April 2017

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  Here’s how Russell Westbrook made NBA history in 2017.

  March 2017

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  Like teams in the Super Bowl, the popularity of Oscar contenders can also be regional. Here are the hotspots from 2017.

  February 2017

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  A lot can happen in the last 2:00 of an NBA game and the refs don’t always get it right. We tracked the calls in 2018.

  February 2017

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  What are the odds an artist will make it big? Three years and 75,000 concerts later, we finally have an answer.

  January 2017

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  We analyzed 12,147 images to see how the media covers Trump and Clinton. It’s not a pretty picture.

  October 2016

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  Hindsight is 20/20. We redraft decades of NBA picks using their career stats to find the breakouts and the busts.

  September 2016