Alvin Chang
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alv9n.com
Alvin Chang
@alv9n.com
● Professor @journalismdesign.bsky.social
● Interactive data journalist pudding.cool
● Moar buttondown.com/charthead // alv9n.com
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My latest piece for @puddingviz.bsky.social: In pursuit of democracy

pudding.cool/2025/11/demo...
The ninth annual Pudding Cup is live! Submit your non-commercial data/visual stories. Winners receive $1,500.

pudding.cool/pudding-cup/
The Pudding Cup
The Pudding's annual picks for the best visual and data-driven stories
pudding.cool
November 12, 2025 at 6:37 PM
A behind-the-scenes look at how I did this piece: buttondown.com/charthead/ar...
November 5, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
How much does Congress talk about democracy? How often do they worry that democracy is eroding? @alv9n.com's latest project analyzes every congressional speech in the last 145 years.

pudding.cool/2025/11/demo...
November 4, 2025 at 3:20 PM
My latest piece for @puddingviz.bsky.social: In pursuit of democracy

pudding.cool/2025/11/demo...
November 4, 2025 at 5:16 PM
October 7, 2025 at 11:53 AM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
On Wednesday, the GOP-controlled House Appropriations Committee voted 34-28 along party lines to advance a funding bill that calls for excluding people living in the states without legal status from #2030Census results that the 14th Amendment says must include “whole number of persons in each state”
September 11, 2025 at 1:09 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
Wu's lopsided victory came despite being outmatched in fund-raising. Kraft spent roughly $260 for every vote earned in the prelim. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/10/m...

via @daigofuji.bsky.social
September 11, 2025 at 12:54 PM
This is chilling.
Texas A&M University System orders audit of all courses after gender identity lesson goes viral

Details: bit.ly/42jauQZ
September 10, 2025 at 12:41 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
Remember, if you encounter what seems like an implausible survey finding, ask:
1. Were survey respondents selected randomly or was this an opt-in poll?
2. Could the results, especially for young adults, be driven by bogus respondents?

Keep this post in mind: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/... 🧪
September 8, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
Our desire to be serious and be taken seriously sometimes gets in the way of something even more important. Scarry understood the power of using fun to explain things that are complicated. This is how we can learn from that today.

simonrogers.net/2025/09/01/h...
How Richard Scarry taught me everything I know about visual storytelling
On the 60th anniversary of Busy Busy World, what we can all learn from a children’s illustrator My grandparents built a boat, and sailed around the world on it. Grandad had been a bricklayer,…
simonrogers.net
September 1, 2025 at 9:35 PM
I'm completely obsessed with this art treatment.

www.washingtonpost.com/sports/inter...
August 29, 2025 at 12:25 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout.

On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar.

This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media.

Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵
August 22, 2025 at 11:41 AM
August 22, 2025 at 11:48 AM
The Parable of the Good Samaritan, if it ended halfway through.
JD Vance on homelessness: "I don't know why we accepted that it was reasonable to have crazy people yelling at our kids. You should not have to cross the street in downtown Atlanta to avoid a crazy person yelling at your family. Those are your streets."
August 21, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
"We need a government-wide changelog." - yes. strong cosign and thanks @flowingdata.com for the shoutout to my lil Census tracker flowingdata.com/2025/08/20/t...
Tracking changes to Census data
Hannah Recht is tracking data through the U.S. Census Bureau APIs: The Census Bureau doesn’t maintain a public changelog or regularly share updates about changes to their sprawling API universe. As…
flowingdata.com
August 20, 2025 at 6:38 PM
An incompetent, egotistical, uncurious administration.

www.propublica.org/article/rfk-...
August 20, 2025 at 12:24 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
Do you want a bullhorn? Or do you want a whisper?

Miriam Tinberg is a great follow for smart, empathetic, and grounded conversations on the internet and we’re lucky to have her on our team.

Stay tuned for more!
August 12, 2025 at 7:19 PM
The horizontal cuts are bad. Onion fonts are good. pudding.cool/2025/08/onio...
Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way
There is more than one way to dice an onion…
pudding.cool
August 12, 2025 at 4:53 PM
A cruel, irresponsible, undemocratic, incompetent administration.

projects.propublica.org/venezuelan-i...
August 11, 2025 at 7:37 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
We followed 260 migrants in Costa Rica—weekly—for 3 months. Findings:
• Stressors like economic precarity and family separation predicted spikes in psychological distress
• Distress quickly somatized: headaches, digestive issues, sleep disturbances
• Effects were immediate and reversible
July 30, 2025 at 6:10 PM
Just had a chill thinking about a PHP cron job that still might be running from my time at the Boston Globe... in 2012.
August 1, 2025 at 3:14 PM
No respect for democracy, in maps

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
August 1, 2025 at 1:49 PM
Such a classic Matt Daniels project
New project! @yufeng.bsky.social analyzed all of the words found on NYC Streets. The data comes from from 8 million Google Street View images, which yielded 138 million snippets of text:

🔗: pudding.cool/2025/07/stre...
July 31, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
Texas Republicans have unveiled a more extreme new gerrymander that targets 5 Dems by diluting Latino & Black voting power.

Trump won 30 of 38 seats by >10 points & 27 seats by >15 points. All GOP seats likely stay safe, & none that Trump won by <20 got bluer davesredistricting.org/join/b82658a...
July 30, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Alvin Chang
📄 RESEARCH: Justification, tone, and willingness to compromise can make a real difference in the quality of a conversation.

Adjusting these factors can help foster healthy democratic interactions in online debate, but not necessarily change minds.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
July 30, 2025 at 1:29 PM