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Alvin Chang

@alv9n.com

1.4K followers 620 following 130 posts

● Professor @journalismdesign.bsky.social ● Interactive data journalist pudding.cool ● Moar buttondown.com/charthead // alv9n.com

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Jun 13

My latest piece for @puddingviz.bsky.social: 30 minutes with a stranger

30 minutes with a stranger

Watch hundreds of strangers talk for 30 minutes, and track how their moods change

pudding.cool

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · 1d

top tier data viz defector.com/name-a-28-ye...

Reposted by Alvin Chang

Hansi Lo Wang (he/him) @hansilowang.bsky.social · 27d

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”

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Reposted by Alvin Chang

Christina Prignano Deering @christinaprignano.com · 27d

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

A bar chart showing Josh Kraft spent around $260 for every vote he received

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · 28d

This is chilling.

Houston Chronicle @houstonchronicle.com · 29d

Texas A&M University System orders audit of all courses after gender identity lesson goes viral

Details: bit.ly/42jauQZ

Reposted by Alvin Chang

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · Sep 8

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/... 🧪

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Reposted by Alvin Chang

Simon Rogers @simonrogers.bsky.social · Sep 1

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

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Aug 29

I'm completely obsessed with this art treatment.

www.washingtonpost.com/sports/inter...

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Reposted by Alvin Chang

ProPublica @propublica.org · Aug 22

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. 🧵

Photo of DOGE staffer Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old white man in a blue pullover, carrying a black backpack.

Photo of 53-year-old Afghan scholar Mohammad Halimi. He is sitting, wearing white pants and shirt with a brown vest.

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Aug 22

Great. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Aug 21

The Parable of the Good Samaritan, if it ended halfway through.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · Aug 21

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."

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Reposted by Alvin Chang

Hannah Recht @hannahrecht.bsky.social · Aug 20

"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

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Aug 20

An incompetent, egotistical, uncurious administration.

www.propublica.org/article/rfk-...

Reposted by Alvin Chang

New_ Public @newpublic.org · Aug 12

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!

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Aug 12

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

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Aug 11

A cruel, irresponsible, undemocratic, incompetent administration.

projects.propublica.org/venezuelan-i...

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Reposted by Alvin Chang

Matthew Blanton @matthewblanton.bsky.social · Jul 30

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

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Aug 1

Just had a chill thinking about a PHP cron job that still might be running from my time at the Boston Globe... in 2012.

Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Aug 1

No respect for democracy, in maps

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Jul 31

Such a classic Matt Daniels project

The Pudding @puddingviz.bsky.social · Jul 28

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...

Reposted by Alvin Chang

Stephen Wolf @stephenwolf.bsky.social · Jul 30

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...

Map of Texas Republicans proposed new congressional gerrymander. Each district is shaded according to its 2024 presidential margin, and 30 districts in red would have voted for Donald Trump while only the other 8 in blue would have favored Kamala Harris.

Graph that shows the 2024 presidential margin for each district on Texas Republicans' new congressional gerrymander proposal. 30 districts voted for Donald Trump by at least 10 points, and 27 of those by at least 15 points. Only 8 districts voted for Kamala Harris, all but very large margins. Most Trump districts are tightly grouped at around 58-60% Republican to avoid wasting excess Republicans while remaining too red for a Democrat to win them.

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Reposted by Alvin Chang

New_ Public @newpublic.org · Jul 30

📄 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/...

Comparative forest plot showing effect sizes for different communication attributes across two outcomes: High-quality response and Quality response. The plot compares data from the United Kingdom and United States, with colored dots representing different categories: Evidence-based argument (green), Compromise (purple), Disrespectful tone (green), Out-party interaction (red), and Non-partisan interaction (red). Each category has a central dot and error bars showing the range of effect sizes, with a vertical dashed line at zero representing no effect. The x-axis shows effect size in percentage points, ranging from approximately -0.15 to 0.15.

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Reposted by Alvin Chang

Reuters Graphics @graphics.reuters.com · Jul 30

As many parts of the US brace for a sweltering week, our latest uncovers a critical and often overlooked intersection of climate change and correctional policy: The dangerous heat crisis within US prisons www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

Scorching cells

How heat threatens lives in America’s prisons

www.reuters.com

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Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Jul 29

Just did a much-needed migration off Substack and to Buttondown: buttondown.com/charthead

It was genuinely WAY easier and smoother than I expected using this guide: docs.buttondown.com/substack

ChartHead

I’m Alvin Chang, a data and visual journalist. This is a newsletter about how I use visuals to tell stories using data and narratives—and ultimately how I think about using pixels to shape our mental ...

buttondown.com

Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Jul 29

If empathy is your goal, it's not useful to put people on a stage to perform diametrically opposed identities.

Alvin Chang @alv9n.com · Jul 28

This piece is stunning.

www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

Eroding protections for public lands

Trump policies reshape the role of federally owned land, against the tide of U.S. public opinion

www.reuters.com

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