Lucia Walinchus
LightNews LightNews
banner
walinchus.bsky.social
Lucia Walinchus
@walinchus.bsky.social
5.2K followers 640 following 1.4K posts
Managing Data Editor, NBC owned stations. Public records attorney, journalist, ice hockey player/coach. Former bylines: NY Times , Washington Post, Eye on Ohio, etc.

Hearts= likes OR bookmarks
Posts Replies Media Videos
walinchus.bsky.social
7/ And there's many more! I encourage you to watch them all.

@michelmartinnpr.bsky.social

dupont.org/2026-winners
Scott Pelley and Michel Martin look at video awards
February 6, 2026 at 3:53 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
4/ I also really appreciated getting to see the other winners. Here is my colleague @mikehixenbaugh.com who won for "Dealing with the Dead."

UNT has since stopped their practice of taking unclaimed bodies! @nbcnews.com
www.nbcnews.com/specials/dea...
February 6, 2026 at 3:53 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
3/ A big part of this was the Solutions Journalism piece: what are other cities doing to promote traffic safety, and why isn’t Dallas doing that?

www.nbcdfw.com/investigatio...

@soljourno.bsky.social
Scott Friedman walks through Edmonton in a crosswalk designed to let people go in all directions
February 6, 2026 at 3:53 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
2/ “Driven to Death” is a data-focused series looking at questions like: why does Dallas have one of the highest pedestrian death rates?

www.nbcdfw.com/tag/driven-t...
February 6, 2026 at 3:53 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
1/7 Beyond grateful to be part of this wonderful team who received a 2026 DuPont-Columbia award.

@columbiajournalism.bsky.social selected 15 among ~500 entries.

Thanks to @parksdigsin.bsky.social, Scott, and the @nbcdfw.com crew!

(This is roughly equivalent to a Pulitzer for my print friends!)
Picture of the Dallas NBC investigative team with the DuPont-Columbia award
February 6, 2026 at 3:53 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
Fascinating study on why kids think sports is fun.

Winning comes in #40 out of 81.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

@avinashsc.com @seeinclearly.bsky.social @drkam.bsky.social
Ranking of what determines fun. Click the link to read them all.
January 16, 2026 at 7:50 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
4/6 I was reading recently in this book about a study where scientists looked at flight crews in simulators to see the effect of exhaustion.

Here’s the crazy part, though: teams who were more exhausted actually did better overall. This was not what anyone expected.
January 5, 2026 at 3:49 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
1/6 Today is the Mondayest Monday of the year. I have calculated this. It is the darkest and it is the coldest.

Okay, actually if you want to be technical, the two Mondays before and after December 21, the winter equinox, are the darkest... 
Screenshot of the NOAA solar Calculator for Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage's average temperature for December 2025 was -22F.
January 5, 2026 at 3:49 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
25. Tiny Nature by Jamie Rosencrans- Here are some nice mushrooms.
December 31, 2025 at 1:17 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
🤓This year I read 17,162 pages in 53 books.

Below is a thread of what I liked and what I didn't.

What should I read next year #booksky?
Summary of the longest and shortest, also the most popular and least popular books. Sample of book covers from books I read this year Sample of book covers from books I read this year Graph of pages read per year
December 31, 2025 at 1:17 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
I do a lot with legal data, so as you can imagine I love this nonprofit!

They can add to this list reporting for @nbcnews.com-owned stations. If anyone has a good tutorial for their new API, please send it, as I have yet use it much.

Fantastic resource if you are interested in federal court data.
Free Law Project's numbers for this year. For example, over 100 million API requests served, over 2 million monthly visitors
December 29, 2025 at 10:19 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
You have to be a journalist or an attorney? Why not both?
Picture of the Hasbro game, the Game of Life, with the journalist and attorney career cards taken out
December 29, 2025 at 1:38 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
Here's my hot take on Christmas. 🎄
You really can't improve on the original version of the Grinch. These newer versions give him some sort of backstory- he's deprived somehow. But the real Grinch isn't trying to deal with some sort of emotional childhood trauma. He's just a guy who's fed up with the crassness of Christmas commercialism. And honestly, same. He thinks that taking away the glitz and glam will give the Whos what they deserve. But the Whos aren't so shallow. Giving presents is their love language. They are a caring community who welcome him back with open arms. Book cover of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
December 22, 2025 at 2:37 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
7/7 Long story short: please share!

Here is the full story again. And tagging a few folks who might be interested: @annabower.bsky.social @clancyny.bsky.social @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
Map of attempted case reopenings by NBC News
December 17, 2025 at 9:35 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
Very cool to see the @pwhlsceptres.bsky.social started a book club!

Our local women's hockey league actually also has a book club! Here's what we have read so far. What should we read next?

💙📚 🏒🙌
Toronto sceptres book club december read: Gone Before Goodbye by Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon Backcheck book club reads: A Good Girl's Guide to Murder None of This is True This is How it Always is We Ride upon Sticks House in the Cerulean Sea Invisible Women The Girls "Game Change: The Life and Death of Steve Montador, and the Future of Hockey " Atomic Habits Red Rising Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon Rock Paper Scissors The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi Beartown You Will Find Your People, Lane Moore I Cheerfully Refuse Leif Enger Paperback Crush Gabrielle Moss The Great Alone - Kristin Hannah The Women- Kristin Hannah The Many Lives of Mama Love Station Eleven Before we were yours by Lisa wingate Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (Gail Honeyman) Banyan Moon by Thao Thai
December 14, 2025 at 7:21 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
2/4 Records on more than 6,700 people housed in the Everglades detention center since it opened reveal Gov. Ron DeSantis’ claim in July that all had final orders of deportation was false.
Of 6, 725 detainees since july, only 22% had a criminal conviction, excluding traffic offenses, 43% had charges pending and 31% had no criminal history
December 10, 2025 at 1:30 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
1/4 Behind the story: Reporter Tony Pipitone found "Florida Soft-Sided Facility South" in this data. Hint: the sign outside has a different name.

He compared the governor's comments to this data, released through a FOIA suit. Check out this story with the results:

www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/s...
Secrets of ‘Alligator Alcatraz' revealed in newly released data analyzed by NBC6 Investigates by Tony Pipitone
December 10, 2025 at 1:30 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
New from @sciam.bsky.social: the article talks about Holland and I understand that because they are several standard deviations above everyone else.

For comparison: about 1% of US travel is by bike.

But I have to hand it to the Swiss! Biking in a country with that many mountains is impressive.
Top 15 Walking and Cycling Countries This chart shows data for the 15 nations where cycling and walking account for the highest share of kilometers traveled. The study found huge variation in active travel between different cities within a single country, reflecting the significance of local-level decisions on infrastructure and land use. The dots represent the spread of city-level values within each nation and highlight the local differences behind national averages. Countries where the researchers had data for fewer than 10 cities were excluded from the analysis. — All cities with populations of at least 50,000, except outliers* Lowest nonoutlier 25th percentile Median Mean 75th percentile Highest nonoutlier Outlier Share of Total Kilometers Traveled (percent) 4 8 12 16 0 Afghanistan • Bangladesh Belgium Cambodia Colombia Denmark Finland Germany Hungary Japan Nepal • Netherlands Philippines Sweden Switzerland 20 24 28 000 00 DO0 O 0 THINGO CO In the median Japanese city, around 1.5 percent of travel occurs on a bicycle, but in the outliers, including certain suburbs of Tokyo and Osaka, that value exceeds 6 percent. CYCLING • 3880
December 3, 2025 at 7:19 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
Yet another reason to be grateful for modern engineering: 17% of all medieval cathedrals ultimately collapsed.
Cover of THE GOTHIC ENTERPRISE A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral by the four columns that mark the central crossing. As construction progressed and more and more weight was added, these columns began to develop an unhealthy bulge of nine inches. In response, 112 wooden and stone buttresses were added to the interior and exterior of the building in an effort to redistribute the crushing weight. Moreover, the spire developed a worrying tilt of twenty-seven and one-half inches to the south and east, which required inserting strainer arches in the central crossing and southwest choir aisle. (J. M. W. Turner depicted these arches in the lovely 1802 painting shown in Figure 10.) Salisbury has been lucky. Beauvais Cathedral, which is the tallest Cothic cathedral ever built, suffered a catastrophic collapse of a portion of the choir in 1282. In addition, a 291-foot stone crossing tower with a wooden steeple that was added in 156g collapsed four years later. The Norman central tower of Winchester Cathedral fell in 1107, and there are recorded collapses and failures at other cathedrals such as Gloucester (late twelfth century), Worcester (in 1175), Lincoln (in 1240), Ely (in 1321), Norwich (in 1367), and Hereford (in 1786), to mention but a few. One source estimates that at least 17 percent of all cathedrals built during the medieval period ultimately suffered catastrophic collapse.
December 2, 2025 at 4:35 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
2/5 like sports journalists and coaches. It seems there’s something about playing a game that intrinsically teaches you about physics.
120 LEONARD ZAICHKOWSKY AND DANIEL PETERSON down, you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions.? tion." 24 Wolpert terms this "the optimal way of combining informa-This movement analysis system is so useful that we even call on it, subconsciously, to predict the movements of others. Since we have mastered the task of dribbling a basketball, we under. stand the physics of the motion, even when watching someone else do it. While observing a player with the ball coming at us, our brain monitors the ball using the same combination of visual stimuli and internal prediction code as if we were dribbling. Experienced players use this finely tuned monitoring program to anticipate and guard oncoming attackers. In a fascinating example of this, Italian researchers found that expert basketball players could predict the success of another player's jump shot before the ball even left the hand of the shooter." They asked three groups of volunteers—professional basketball players, coaches, and those who never watch basketball-to view partial video clips of jump shots, then guess if the shot went in or missed; both were equally represented in the sample of shots. The video was stopped at several different points, including before the ball left the shooter's hand to several points in the arc of the shot toward the basket. By comparing expert players to coaches, the researchers tried to tease apart the neural advantages of playing the sport versus just watching the sport. Sure enough, the players were better and faster at predicting the outcome of a shot than either the coaches or the neutral ob-servers, even before the ball had left the shooter's fingers. "This indicates that elite athletes, but not expert watchers or novices, were able to extract relevant information on the fate of the shots at the basket by using kinematic cues from the player's body movements," the researchers concluded. THE PLAYMAKER'S ADV…
November 19, 2025 at 2:08 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
1/5: Fascinating: researchers recruited elite basketball players, avid basketball fans, and regular folks to predict who would make a basket in a series of videos showing people about to shoot.

Players were much better at successfully predicting this. Even over “expert” watchers
Book cover of The playmaker’s advantage by Leonard Zaichkowsky and Daniel Peterson
November 19, 2025 at 2:08 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
Note: this could be better labeled- it's really an aggregate of everyone's mean. So on average New Yorkers spent ~593.33 years commuting to work in 2023. And that is ALL those who work outside the home in that area.

Thank you @ryebreadnyc.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy for helping me clarify that!
November 18, 2025 at 1:06 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
It's the mean commute time per year for all commuters. If you want to look at any variables use
vars <- load_variables(2023, "acs1", cache = TRUE).

So here we are filtering for B08013_001:

I should label this better though- thank you for pointing this out- it's a sum of the average for everyone.
Showing the Census B08013_001 variable, Estimate!!Aggregate travel time to work (in minutes) and it's breakdown by sex.
November 18, 2025 at 12:59 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
Wow commute times in NYC are solidly twice per year what they are in any other major city.

I would take an hour on a train though over half that in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Created in #rstats using @kylewalker.bsky.social's #tidycensus
Mean commute times for several cities per year. Data from the American Community Survey
November 18, 2025 at 12:32 PM
walinchus.bsky.social
5/9 In some ways suburbanization led to positive changes- ethnic groups became much more integrated. But redline mortgage policies meant that black Catholics were still segregated.
132 / Chapter Five saipulations, however, went unheeded, indicating that even as ta re he challenged his parishioners, "because of black and poor" peolen t raculous Medal. "I want you to hear the Gospel," Connolly pled and territorial definitions of the parish increasingly los their mannt remained.2 the suburban Church the racial boundares nhat de het Cathole pace body of American Catholicism, a process that had begun as ach ei ous ethnically inflected forms of Catholicism into one religouty ines Postwar suburbanization helped complete the amalgamation of group became further removed from the experience of immigration. la Postwar suburbs laity who had seen themselves as frish, Pollsh or kule set themselves simply as Catholic, Parishes established to serve burpen immigrants shed their ethnic affiliations and the names of new wbut Catholics when they lived in urban ethnie enclaves came incuralle parishes, the feasts and rituals they observed, and the lay amocation du animated them were no longer dehned by ethnicity. However, because suburbla's deep racial segregation, newly suburbanized Catholic ahor ing wartime and suburban homeownership in the postwar period bestones creasingly identified themselves as white. Loyal support of the nationd. of talian Catholics in particular yatus as white Americans which to had frequently been denied in past generations. Despite the bes elfors ol Church leaders and some lay activists to support civil rights and parib is tegration, others among the laity sought to maintain residential sees tion and defined the boundaries of their parish through racial exclusi Meanwhile, suburbia's comparatively small community of Black Cabdis demanded that their Church live up to its teachings on race and racim. ad address their unique needs. Even as the civil rights movement progressed toward its denoueen. Latin American immigration to Long Island, which had begun in the 1950% increased dramatically in the 1970s. The Diocese of Rockville Centre and is…
November 14, 2025 at 3:13 PM