CODE REVIEW: A Blog

This is the first in a series on AI and my journey using it as a multimedia storyteller and journalist. I remember when, between 2023 and 2024, early users of a new breed of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models couldn’t stop talking about it. A group of fintech guys I knew raved […]

When I graduated from grad school and moved from the Midwest to the New York City area, I quickly discovered how challenging it was to find a small circle of committed friends. In a city like NYC it’s very easy to meet new people, but connecting on a deeper level is another ball game. People […]

Learn how Critical Race Theory actually works by exploring these 50 everyday things built by racism from America’s past.

Crime stats lie, a lot, and that is usually by design

Every year Big Brother contestants agree to be totally isolated from society for the duration of the season. This means they miss major news events.  On rare occasions producers break the cardinal rule and reveal really important information, like the September 11 attacks, the presidential election results, and the COVID-19 outbreak (which ramped up during […]

A closer look at the data behind Big Brother’s notorious live feeds outages

Interactive black history project shows how America’s love for black culture, but not black people, has erased African Americans’ role in pioneering American music.

From slave patrols to Jim Crow to the war on drugs, the history of police brutality in black America looks like a recurring nightmare.

Cook County and Chicago coronavirus data reveal more than 85 percent of coronavirus deaths were linked to three conditions.

Despite daily televised updates and frequent data dumps, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city of New York have been hesitant to publish neighborhood-level stats showing the impact of COVID-19 on the four boroughs. That is until yesterday afternoon, when the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released zip-code level COVID-19 data via its Github […]

If it weren’t for the data viz and visual storytelling of the last decade, journalism might be dead. Shortly before the start of 2010 the future of journalism looked grim. Newspaper readership was shifting, ad revenue was tanking, and jobs were being cut. Several papers filed for bankruptcy, while newspaper stocks sank. The so-called Digital […]

After three uncomfortable experiences at Walgreens drugstores it’s time to think about racial profiling and when to draw a line.

In order to understand Big Brother’s track record with diversity and representation, I created a dataset containing demographic information for every contestant who’s been on the show. I visualized some of the major takeaways of my analysis and presented them in one massive blog post. Here I lay out the methodology, caveats and thought-process behind […]

The image of three glum Big Brother contestants wearing obnoxious scouting uniforms while sitting in front of host Julie Chen-Moonves will go down as one of the reality competition’s most embarrassing moments.

I spent a year counting the times I experienced this age-old type of racial profiling

In celebration of Black History Month, here’s a look at the African-American innovators who paved the way for digital storytelling.

Subway line posters on Etsy can be expensive. I decided to use public data to create my own.

A college friend started a company that helps children learn to code under the philosophy that coding is set to be the fourth R of education (reading, writing, arithmetic and “algorithms”). I believe it.

When president John F. Kennedy saw the front page of the New York Times May 4, 1963, he said the images made him “sick.” Pictures and recordings of African-American children in Birmingham, Alabama being mauled by police dogs and hosed down by members of the local fire department were making their way across the world. […]