I met Thera Marie Crane at Juniata College, probably in 1998. Along with another reader of this newsletter, Leah Deskevich (Hi Leah!), we participated in Juniata’s small piano performance program and have kept in touch for almost 28 years.

After college, Thera joined the Peace Corps and was stationed in Namibia. As is her way, she dove in. She taught at the local school, organized book drives and pen pal programs, and once rescued her village’s backed-up mail from a nearby city’s post office.

She also began studying Kwanyama, a Bantu language spoken in Namibia. That led to more formal fieldwork and a PhD in linguistics documenting languages in Zambia, Namibia, and South Africa.

A few months ago Thera asked if I was interested in making an interactive web map of language data from South Africa. Of course I said yes.

Take a Look

“The race for governor is crowded, with five candidates vying for the Democratic nomination,” reads an article describing the Wisconsin governor’s race.

“Hold my beer,” says Alaska.

Alaska’s Aug. 18 primary election will have 15 candidates for United States Representative, 16 candidates for United States Senator, and 17 candidates for governor in an open primary. Voters will get to choose just one candidate for each position, and the top four vote getters, regardless of party, will move on to a ranked choice general election in November.

While the House and Senate elections draw a lot of national attention, the race for governor is arguably going to be the most impactful for Alaskans. And it’s important to ask who is giving to each candidate, especially because Alaska currently has no individual contribution limits — a policy that will also be on the ballot on Aug. 18.

Read the Story

Americans have watched supermarket eggs drop from $6/dozen early last year to $2/dozen this June. The decrease in consumer egg prices has become one of President Trump’s most touted accomplishments.

He doesn’t talk the prices of tomatoes ($2.50/lb), ground beef ($6.75/lb), or coffee ($9.50/lb), all of which recently reached record highs. He also never talks about why egg prices are down. In this article and graphic, I do.

It’s a simple but strange story that sits at the intersection of politics, economics, disease, and foreign trade gone awry.

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State-level campaign finance laws don’t fit Red State/Blue State divides. California allows individuals to give almost $40,000 to a campaign for governor. Wisconsin is next in line at $20,000. Alaska had the lowest limits in the nation, set at just $500 per year by a 2006 ballot initiative.

In 2021, Alaska’s individual contribution limits were removed in their entirety, fueling a gold rush in state politics.

How that happened, and what’s happened since, is a fascinating story. It shows how easily politicians can derail the intent of their constituents, and how U.S. Supreme Court decisions continue to reshape our elections.

Read the Story

I can make a decent sketch, when I take the time. For a couple of years I worked through every exercise in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, which I had picked up from the University of Hawaii Women's Campus Club Thrift Shop for a dollar.

Once I started using pens, I found that I enjoyed using tiny points of ink to shade areas, a technique known as stippling. After a long education spent looking at low-angle satellite imagery, it just made sense to my brain — to show a deeper shadow, keep adding more dots.

This project was about (a) using math on an existing image (or video) to create stippling patterns, and (b) building a simple sandbox where we can mess with the appearance of those patterns and get visual feedback.

If you make anything from your own photos or videos, I’d love to see it!

Read the Article

Give the App a Whirl

Unless you follow farming-specific publications, bird flu has largely been absent from the news. In part that’s because this year has been far quieter than last.

This season, only two outbreaks killed more than a million birds:

• Jefferson County, Wisconsin lost 3.1 million egg-laying chickens and 500,000 pullets to bird flu at the end of September;

• Grant County, Washington lost 2 million egg-laying chickens in early October.

The fact that there were only two massive outbreaks is largely good news. Last year, approximately 4 million chickens were killed every week at egg farms across the U.S. up to and through the holidays, which drove egg prices through the roof.

I added a supplemental graph to my bird flu dashboard to show the difference. It updates whenever the USDA publishes new data.

While the number of outbreaks at egg farms are way down, farms that raise turkeys and ducks are still regularly seeing infections. According to industry news, lucky timing helped to limit the impact of turkey deaths on Thanksgiving prices.

There has also been an uptick in deaths in “Other poultry,” a broad category that ranges from backyard flocks to mixed poultry farms with tens of thousands of birds. LeGrange County, Indiana has been an epicenter, recording 63 bird flu outbreaks since October.

See the Visual

Personal notes:

• We live in NYC! Do not hesitate to let us know if you get out here.

• The logistics of moving put a damper on my newsletter, but I have a few projects in the works and about a million more ideas.

As a scientist and former camp counselor, this project hit me pretty hard.

For seven summers (ages 13 to 19), I was a counselor at Camp Rokilio, a small Boy Scout camp in eastern Wisconsin. I learned a lot of life lessons while working as a youth in charge of other youth: how to take initiative and just fix things that need fixing, how to apologize and move on, how much I love being outside with friends, how it feels to stand together against injustice, and how deeply I enjoy working hard with others towards a common goal. I also learned how to tie a lot of knots — arguably my most useful skill.

So reading about the disaster at Camp Mystic — a Christian summer camp for girls — and the terrifying last moments of 25 children, two teenage camp counselors, and the camp director who was frantically trying to save them when his truck was swept away struck a chord.

There has been a lot of great reporting done on the floods, and I’ve read it all. One of the best (in a maddening way) is a recent article by Alejandra Martinez and Zach Despart in the Texas Tribune. It’s an exceptionally reported article about how residents of Kerr County, a typically bucolic region of campgrounds and RV parks, didn’t want to pay even $6/year for sirens along their portion of the Guadalupe River, a stretch known for deadly flash floods. Even Camp Rokilio had a siren to muster campers in the event of a tornado, tested every week and used once for a real emergency during my time as a counselor.

It makes me feel ill, to know how little we can think another person’s life is worth. But the story of the July 4 floods in Central Texas bears witnessing as a cautionary tale, especially as the U.S. dismantles its infrastructure and investments that were focused on preparation and prevention. We pay for everything, eventually.

See the Visual

Personal notes:

• I will be in Anchorage from August 19 until September 12. If you’re there too, I’d love to see you!

• After that, we are moving from Atlanta to New York City. I’m continuing to freelance and work on projects for this newsletter. Come visit!

In my latest project, I took a deep dive into researching and visualizing the effects of bird flu on the poultry industry. I created an animated map showing the timeline of outbreaks across America since February 2022.

The most recent wave of bird flu caused the death of 15% of the egg-laying hens in America in less than six months, which caused the wholesale price of eggs to reach $8.17 on March 3, 2025.

I also summarized a bunch of the new-to-me information that made me realize how bad the bird flu situation is for poultry farmers, especially egg producers. And it is bad!

Did you know that we already have vaccines that could protect our egg-laying hens from bird flu, but broiler chicken growers have begged the U.S. government to forbid egg producers from using them? I had no idea. If you're like me, read on.

See the Visualization

The Impetus

If we cherry-pick, any of us can make the price of eggs mean something grand. Like how-well-the-country-is-being-run grand.

On April 2 Donald Trump was praising his Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins when he said that she had brought down the price of eggs by 59%. The decrease wasn’t because of Rollins (more on that below), but his math was correct if you compared the wholesale price of eggs on April 2 to their peak price the month before on March 3. Then he started to go off the rails, saying on April 7 that egg prices were down 79% and on April 8 and April 9 that they were down 87%. Those later statements don’t math.

On the other side of the aisle, there are entire Tik Tok accounts dedicated to showing the price of eggs in the grocery store, with the tone being that anyone who voted for Donald Trump is an idiot because egg prices are still not under $2 per dozen.

I wanted an easy way to check the facts.

What controls the price of eggs?

Over the holidays it was bird flu combined with seasonal demand. Now it’s just bird flu.

Initially I thought that inflation would affect the price of eggs in some way. But after plotting the price of eggs adjusted to today’s dollars over the past 45 years, I’ve proven to myself that isn’t the case:

If the price of eggs and inflation were intimately connected, the line above would be relatively flat. But egg prices have both increased and decreased against inflation by almost 100%. (On a smaller scale, each of the small spikes on the line marks another year of baking cookies between Thanksgiving and Christmas.)

But the big issue is the parts of the line that I’ve colored red. Those time periods all correspond to outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). HPAI gruesomely kills birds, and the death of egg-laying hens and pullets (young chickens that will grow up to become egg-laying hens) directly affects the price of eggs. Documented HPAI outbreaks in 1983-84 and in 2014-2015 both caused sudden and obvious 50% jumps in the price of eggs. The current outbreak began in 2022, is ongoing, and in December 2024 and January 2025 alone it caused the death of 33 million hens, approximately 10% of the US commercial egg-laying flock.

The Trump administration has made two moves to decrease the price of eggs, both of which have a moment-of-zen quality:

1. The US has increased imports of fresh eggs tenfold over the past two months. Turkey (10% tariffs) and Mexico (25% tariffs) have become our biggest import sources. 💰

2. Agriculture Secretary Rollins has announced a $1 billion dollar effort to combat bird flu. It includes $100 million dollars to develop a poultry vaccine. 💉

Show me the Dashboard

I spent some time with provisional overdose mortality data from the CDC. Here are some of my takeaways:

• Overdose deaths appear to have peaked between June 2022 and June 2023, when 111,466 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses.

• But overdose death rates are now falling in nearly every state. North Carolina’s overdose death rate has dropped by more than half between October 2022 and October 2024, which is incredible. Scientists don’t exactly know why, but opioids may be becoming less potent.

• There are exceptions to the good news: Alaska, Washington, and Nevada in particular have high overdose death rates that haven’t come down as quickly as the rest of the country.

• As of October 2024, Alaska had the second highest overdose death rate in the nation, behind only the District of Columbia (and DC’s rate has been falling sharply while Alaska’s has just started to ease down).

• Fentanyl remains the main driver of overdose deaths in America.

• The number of deaths involving opioids like heroin and prescription opioids have been dropping, but there has also been a steady rise in deaths involving stimulants like methamphetamine.

• It’s hard to estimate the exact number of multiple-drug deaths from the CDC data, but it seems like 30-40% of deaths from overdoses involve multiple drugs. Apparently fentanyl mixed with methamphetamine is a common and lethal mix.

See for Yourself

I got annoyed by someone online who kept repeating that Donald Trump won the 2024 general election by “a landslide.” I started looking up election results, news analyses, and transcripts of speeches.

It turns out that Donald Trump himself just really loves the word “landslide”, and he uses it constantly. He wins by landslides, his support helps loyalists win by landslides, his enemies lose by landslides, etc.

I thought it would be interesting (and humorous) to explore the election results while reframing them by taking Donald Trump at his word. If he won in 2024 by exactly one landslide, by how many landslides has every other US president won?

See for Yourself

I like voting early. For me, it’s always been convenient, and I like checking my civic duty off the list.

Doing so has bitten me (lightly) a few times in local races. In Atlanta, where we were still relatively new, the 2024 general election included a non-partisan city council election, and there was virtually no information on the candidates until the local press released results from a questionnaire a few days before Election Day. Unfortunately, by then ~50% of Atlanta had already voted early and in-person. I remember almost exactly the same thing happening to me in Anchorage with candidates for school board.

But it all got me thinking about which is better: (1) many polling locations that are widely distributed across the city but are only open for a single day, or (2) fewer and further apart polling locations that are open for a few weeks. There is data that could answer that question in Georgia, but it requires money to pay for data requests to do the analysis.

In the meantime, while early voting in was in progress, I looked for a map of early in-person polling locations in Georgia. There wasn’t one, so I spent a lot of time on county websites, scoured PDFs and meeting minutes, and chatted with some nice county officials to make one.

I learned a lot about how elections are managed. The differences in early in-person voting access between Georgia counties are vast.

See for Yourself

I despise ads, but along with everyone else I’ve been seeing more and more ad content (and less and less of my friends) in my social media feeds. I wanted to know exactly how much of my feed was non-friend content, so I categorized 100 posts every day for 100 days for both Facebook and Instagram.

Sometimes it was pretty rough. When I left my laptop behind to visit some friends in North Carolina I took my notebook with my coding system (1 = friend, 2 = ad, 3 = suggested post, etc.). But somehow cataloging a post as an ad for science felt better than having to just see it and swipe past.

The short of it is that during my 100-day snapshot of July 2023, approximately 40% of these social media feeds were ads. That’s more than broadcast television during the heyday of 90s sitcoms. And it’s only going up.

See for Yourself