By the Numbers

I’ve spent the last decade working with and advocating for open and accessible data. It’s not enough to just collect the data, and put it online in a spreadsheet (although this data collection work is absolutely crucial, and underrated).

For people — policymakers, journalists, the general public — to make use of it, you need to make it easy to use. That’s what we try to...

For a long time, the “U-shaped curve” has been a dominant framework in the research on happiness. As the theory goes, happiness scores tend to follow a U-shape with age: people are happiest when they’re young, become less so into middle-age, and things pick up again in their later years.

This was often presented as a universal pattern across countries. This theory has a...

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about why the UK needs to get its act together and build some new reservoirs. It hasn’t built one in my lifetime — despite adding 10 million people — and the mismatch between winter and summer rain is probably going to get worse.

The UK has had an extremely dry summer. Look at photos online, and you’ll see the traditionally green parks looking like hay.

Just how dry have things been?

Look at data since the 1800s, and

This summer has been a hot one for many countries. With an extremely strong (and potentially record-breaking) El Niño on the way, next year is likely to be even hotter. If you’re interested, Zeke Hausfather at the Climate Brink has a very good article on how ...