A Data Visualization Newsletter

Ever feel like the internet is overrun with bad, sad, or terrible news? You’re not alone. Thankfully CNN worked on this “good news generator” to help highlight fun, lighthearted stories that they published in 2023. It might give you a little hit of dopamine as we move into the new year.

This story by Glenn Fleishman is a gripping read for any historian of the internet. It details the story behind Yahoo Pipes — a skunkworks project within Yahoo! that briefly seemed destined to change the way developers built websites. But challenges in scaling bandwidth and finding a business model ultimately doomed the service.

As the battle within Gaza rages, Israel’s military is uncovering hundreds of tunnels and shafts throughout the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s tunnel network is said to stretch some 310 miles, roughly half the length of the New York subway system. Reuters spoke to military experts and relied on its own reporting to construct a detailed picture of the network’s scale and sophistication.

2024 may have just started… but we don’t have to say goodbye to the holidays just yet. That’s because The New York Times recently analyzed data on 424 Hallmark and Lifetime movies to answer the timeless question: are they really all the same? The Times found that they generally adhere to a similar formula, although that may be starting to change.

As we approach the 2024 presidential election — which seems likely to pit the U.S.’s current and former president against one another — economic issues loom as a key factor in the race. Even amid strong job growth and low unemployment, rising house prices and persistent inflation have tainted many Americans' view of Biden’s economy. The Washington Post compares the state of the economy now vs. under Trump across 12 important indicators.