Ten years ago this week, The New York Times introduced the Upshot, a section devoted to explaining “politics, policy and everyday life.” That’s a wide scope, by design. As a result, more than 5,000 articles later, the Upshot has been many things to many readers.
To mark our 10th birthday, we’ve collected 100 stories that embody the Upshot. They are presented chronologically (ranking them is unthinkable!). —Kevin Quealy, Upshot editor
April 2014
An introductory memo to readers on April 22, 2014. In a telling sign of the media environment at the time, a version was published on Facebook first.
April 2014
A launch week interactive feature, based on detailed data from Facebook. The Yankees-Red Sox border is quite close to the hand-drawn version from a 2006 road trip by The Times’s John Branch.
May 2014
Perhaps not the first use of animation in a Times economics article, but an early and memorable one. The world is noisy; try not to over-interpret any single data point.
May 2014
An update of a Times classic. (Note: Another update is coming soon!)
June 2014
Visually dynamic and somewhat abstract — from an era when we could (apparently) tell readers on mobile devices to come back when they were on a larger screen instead.
July 2014
Around the world, nearly every asset class was getting expensive by historical standards, with charts to prove it.
Aug. 2014
Even our sharpest minds sometimes need a break from the day’s economic news. Behold the Fried Calamari Index, a measure of food trendiness.
Aug. 2014
Newspaper articles don’t typically have room for 50 charts, but that’s what was called for in this detailed look at migration patterns in America, all from census data. We even made mugs.
Sept. 2014
This bot tweeted every time an N.F.L. coach made a fourth-down decision our statistical model disagreed with. A project ahead of its time — and whose torch has been carried by ESPN and The Athletic.
Sept. 2014
Having a child helps your career — if you’re a man.
Nov. 2014
Lots of successful visual expression is really just about scale: How big, how fast, how widespread, how dangerous? This article showed things below ground as if they were above it, with clarifying results.
Dec. 2014
Answer 25 questions and this quiz will tell you what parts of the U.S. have dialects most similar to yours. One of the first viral Times quizzes. Years later, a sibling quiz was published for Ireland and the U.K., extending the empire. (Canadians take note: An update that includes you is in the works.)
Jan. 2015
An article addressing the “merely affluent” among us. The world might be a different place if more people knew their income rank.
Feb. 2015
Personal finance scolds may tut-tut anyone spending their hard-earned cash on a lottery ticket. But there is utility in the purchase that may be worth the cost.
Feb. 2015
A distribution you don’t often get to see: the calorie counts of more than 3,000 meals at Chipotle. The typical order had about 1,070 calories; one in 10 had more than 1,600.
March 2015
More charts deserve to stretch out in three dimensions.
May 2015
Geolocation created a personal experience for readers wherever they lived.
May 2015
Asking readers to draw charts in their web browsers was a first for The Times.
June 2015
Mining The Times’s wedding announcements for evidence of a naming trend.
Oct. 2015
What a presidential candidate’s tax plan has in common with six-minute abs.
Dec. 2015
Comparisons across countries help show the rarity of gun deaths in advanced nations: In Japan, being killed with a gun was as rare as death by lightning strike in the U.S.
Dec. 2015
What one data point tells us about class, education, gender roles and caregiving in the United States.
May 2016
When New York’s zoning code turned 100 years old.
June 2016
“A growing body of evidence suggests that there is still a path, albeit a narrow one, for Mr. Trump to win without gains among nonwhite voters.”
June 2016
Estimates of turnout and support for more than 8,000 different demographic groups.
July 2016
What foods are healthful? The results suggest a surprising diversity of opinion, even among experts.
Sept. 2016
Four pollsters received the same raw polling data, and gave four different overall estimates. The experiment revealed the many judgment calls that can influence a polling result.
Oct. 2016
In 2016, one Black Trump supporter moved a national polling survey by a full percentage point despite being one of around 3,000 panelists.
Nov. 2016
What started as a small group project called the “live model” in 2014 is now a sprawling technical project known as “The Needle.” An essential part of any election night.
Dec. 2016
An interactive, season-by-season map of New York’s shadows.
March 2017
It’s a goat on a bridge eating a flaming rug pulled from a collapsing sand castle! This article, of course, is about the Affordable Care Act.
June 2017
We’re now more likely to tell our daughters they can be anything they want to be. But we don’t do the same for our sons.
June 2017
Making preliminary estimates when the news dictates that you can’t wait for the release of official numbers.
June 2017
You could find an illustration of an increasingly winner-take-all economy by looking into a reporter’s closet.
Aug. 2017
Saw a cool chart on Instagram; maybe we can make a crowdsourced version?
Sept. 2017
From left: Jason Henry for The New York Times; Tony Luong for The New York Times
In many companies across America, a position on the janitorial staff once came with a chance to climb the corporate ladder. But a focus on efficiency, while making companies more productive, has also limited opportunity and widened inequality.
Sept. 2017
Jordan Siemens/Getty Images
Telling a story about the world from the changing perspective of search results for a stock photo of “woman.”
Sept. 2017
Nearly anything can be compared and explained using a bracket — even international health care systems.
Nov. 2017
Are you a mini-nepo baby? Type in your job to find out.
Dec. 2017
How will a new tax law affect me? This calculator had the answer.
Jan. 2018
Possibly the most technically complicated project the Upshot has ever published. (Is it due for another go?)
Jan. 2018
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Lots of Upshot journalism is about collections — of people, ideas or even objects. Here, we introduce you to an underappreciated segment of the work force: male nurses.
Feb. 2018
An assignment to review a state’s new congressional maps the way a Times food critic might review a new restaurant.
March 2018
One of our most memorable visualizations.
April 2018
In many companies across America, there were more men named John in positions of power than there were women with any name. An expanded update of a 2015 article on the same subject.
May 2018
A simple interactive slider helped explain the eruption of disagreement around a simple question: Which word do you hear?
July 2018
An analysis of hundreds of thousands of race results and self-reported shoe records found that these expensive running shoes really might make you run faster. A follow-up article showed an even larger effect.
July 2018
As detailed as presidential election results get.
Aug. 2018
Four decades of data — depicted in maps and a histogram — showed that children could have diverging economic futures depending on the age when their mothers gave birth.
Sept. 2018
How a localized recession in manufacturing-heavy areas could explain a lot of things.
Dec. 2018
Mothers who are employed spend as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.
April 2019
Still a notable point: Most Democratic and progressive voices on social media are very liberal. Most Democratic voters are not.
April 2019
As more women entered professions, employers began paying disproportionately more to people with round-the-clock availability. Parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother.
June 2019
Single-family zoning is practically gospel in America, but a number of officials across the country are starting to make seemingly heretical moves.
Sept. 2019
Alex Welsh for The New York Times
“It was dusk on the opening night of Burning Man, and the makers and misfits were touching up their art projects and orgy dens.” Hitching a ride with Paul Romer, a noted student and scholar of cities.
Sept. 2019
To understand the competing Democratic health care plans, consider an elaborate home construction metaphor.
Oct. 2019
A photographic depiction of a representative national survey, and also what Barack Obama called “a reminder that behind every opinion lies a human being with real experiences and a story to tell.”
Dec. 2019
A bureaucratic mailing may have saved 700 lives.
Feb. 2020
Documenting the disaster that was the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus.
March 2020
An early estimate of how common deaths from Covid-19 might become. At the time, our figure seemed like a huge number. It turned out to be too low.
April 2020
It was a time when “deaths over expectation” became a more useful mortality metric than official death counts. This is one of many examples from that period of what appear to be broken-looking charts.
May 2020
How many people left New York when the pandemic hit? A rough estimate: about 5 percent, overwhelmingly from the city’s richest neighborhoods.
June 2020
Early in the pandemic, we created a survey asking epidemiologists about their own choices. They are not a risk-taking group.
Oct. 2020
The Internet connoisseur and sleuth Ashley Feinberg called this, “frankly, the best and maybe only good thing The Times has ever done,” perhaps the hottest take on the fridges.
Nov. 2020
Important reporting for American readers to wake up to the morning after the 2020 election, in an environment lacking many facts or certainty.
Dec. 2020
If a Nobel laureate in economics doesn’t know how to pick a health insurance plan, what hope do the rest of us have?
Jan. 2021
What will historians make of this 100 years from now? It is more than 50,000 words long.
March 2021
Testing readers’ preconceptions is an Upshot pastime. Millions of readers’ guesses revealed that, for the most part, those preconceptions were not very accurate in this case.
Aug. 2021
An investigation revealed that hospitals were charging patients wildly different amounts for the same basic services.
Dec. 2021
A relatively straightforward exercise and yet a very revealing one, with implications for a post-Roe America.
Jan. 2022
In just over a decade, the tests have gone from laboratory experiments to an industry that serves more than a third of the pregnant women in America.
Feb. 2022
Distributions are usually more interesting than averages, especially when you’re a New Yorker rooting for a big snowfall.
April 2022
Eden Weingart/The New York Times
When Wordle first became popular, several people on the internet claimed, plausibly, that they had come up with the “best” opening word. Enter WordleBot, which provides custom analysis of your Wordle, every day, however you play. Now many readers around the world don’t Wordle without it.
April 2022
A 3-D animation showing how a pressure wave from a volcanic eruption circled the Earth? Yes, please.
June 2022
A visualization of how post-Roe abortion bans affected women’s access to legal abortion nationwide.
July 2022
The pandemic may have killed the suburban office park. The photographs have an apocalyptic feeling to them.
July 2022
An earnest attempt to put a number to an unanswerable question. Yes, the chances are minuscule. But minuscule is not zero.
Oct. 2022
How major health insurers exploited Medicare to inflate their profits by billions of dollars.
Oct. 2022
An accounting project of sorts, examining the president’s policy goals and Congress’s successes in previously unreported detail.
Dec. 2022
There are many ways to contemplate Mr. Brady’s age, but the best one may be to look outside the sports arena, comparing him with aging workers still going strong in other professions.
March 2023
Budget forecasts are one thing; budget realities are another. (Also an homage of sorts to a notable visualization in the “Flash era” of interactive information graphics.)
March 2023
A simple problem: too much office space, not enough homes. Why can’t you use one to solve the other? The answer includes regulations, logistics, light and even physics.
March 2023
If you flip a coin and call heads, and it comes up heads, you didn’t make a very good prediction, even if it was “right.” The same principle applies to race calls on election night.
April 2023
A daily interactive companion to Spelling Bee that helps you get to Genius even if you don’t always feel like one.
April 2023
When ChatGPT was still new, we showed that people were already using it in real life: to cook, plan and work.
April 2023
An interactive demonstration of how large language models work, from gibberish to complete sentences.
May 2023
Years after lower-wage residents were priced out of expensive coastal metro areas, higher-paid workers are now turning away from them, too.
Aug. 2023
Our weekly history quiz is a playful mix of logic, news and historical inference. Have you signed up for notifications yet?
Aug. 2023
A deeper look at the groups making up the Republican Party of 2024.
Sept. 2023
A perennial fan favorite: an interactive tool to help you follow your N.F.L. team’s playoff chances like an expert, complemented by our annual “playoff trees.”
Sept. 2023
The dire predictions about the cost of health care — from politicians of both parties — simply haven’t materialized. The result is an enormous savings to the federal budget, on the order of 161 years of NASA spending.
Oct. 2023
Created with love for the city, and it shows. Readers adored it.
Dec. 2023
We hope these tactics will give you a leg up if you ever find yourself on the show — or just a sense of superiority when you’re watching at home. (To test them out, play a few “Wheel” rounds.)
Dec. 2023
An analysis of millions of records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration revealed a previously unknown cause of pedestrian deaths in the United States: the setting sun.
Dec. 2023
Cold, hard analysis. Good, clean fun. Part of a tradition of Upshot holiday journalism.
March 2024
Many New Yorkers have trained their eyes to unsee the great piles of trash that abound. This article lets them see the problem — and potential solutions — with fresh eyes.
March 2024
A crystal-clear visualization of attendance trends.
March 2024
Erin Schaff/The New York Times
We think of the Upshot as a place where back-of-the-envelope calculations can be both helpful and welcome. This article, which started with simple estimates on a piece of scratch paper derived from Newton’s laws of motion, embodies both the spirit and the letter of that idea.
March 2024
By far the best story the Upshot has ever published about the possibility of sawing off your finger (and, by extension, the intersection of monopolies, patents and policy).