Posts

The Census Household Pulse Survey is awesome. Weekly/biweekly data on how Americans are coping during the pandemic? Beautiful! Freely accessible microdata? Stunning! Questions on everything from finances to vaccines?

Like most grad students, I suffer from intense guilt when doing anything “non-productive”. The guilt is directly proportional to the amount of hours spent on the non-productive activity. So, as you can imagine, watching every single game of Euro 2020 has been a turbulent ride.

This post describes how I built Crony Connect, a tool to identify politically-connected individuals by cross-referencing public databases. I’m writing this because it might be helpful to others working on similar projects, and also as a reminder to myself of what the hell this code does, because no matter how many comments I add I will absolutely forget.

The FDA’s decision to pause and then re-start the use of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine has prompted an interesting debate. Did the agency undermine confidence in vaccines by highlighting an extremely rare but severe side effect?

Note: This post is not investment advice. And if it was investment advice, it would tell you not to gamble your savings in individual stocks, no matter how good the memes are.

The attempted insurrection on January 6th has got me thinking back to an old debate in political science about which political groups take to the streets, and which ones don’t.

On Saturday, a group of congressional Republicans wrote to President-elect Biden, asking him to dissuade Speaker Pelosi from pursuing a second impeachment of President Trump — “in the spirit of healing”.

Following on from the original My Little Crony map, this visualization zooms in on the government contracts being awarded to firms linked to an Evangelical Christian sect: the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church.

A visualization of the connections between UK politicians and companies being awarded government contracts during the pandemic