Selected Work

Vance's 'childless cat ladies' comment caused outrage. Here's a look at the group by the numbers

This story off the news appears to be the first story to actually quantify this. It's hard as very few datasets contain information on both marital status and pet ownership.

High ratings for nursing homes may not give full story about care problems, deaths

This year long investigation into Medicare's "5 Star" rating system was based on extensive analysis of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data put also extensive reviews of legal cases involving nursing home mishaps to put those data in context.

Scripps News Investigates: The deadly toll of a US ambulance shortage

The primary analysis in this story involved the National Emergency Medical Services Information System, which showed the human costs of a shortage if ambulance chassis when car companies chose to prioirtize pickups over the need for lifesaving vehicles during the pandemic.

In mifepristone case, justices quiz lawyers on the Comstock Act

Daily news coverage of legal issues as a part of the work of the Scripps News Washington Bureau.

Killings of Blacks by Whites Are Far More Likely to Be Ruled ‘Justifiable’

In this project, a collaboration of The New York Times and The Marshall Project, I reported that whites who kill black men are allowed to walk on self-defense claims at an extraordinary rate.

Iowa Isn’t The State Presidential Candidates Pretend It Is

For FiveThirtyEight I spent a month crunching the numbers and found out my adopted state has little in common the state presidential candidates talk about when they're here.

Open Government

This book, a collection I edited on open government in the digital age, collected work from a wide variety of thought leaders including Aaron Swartz, Carl Malamud and Ellen Miller.

The Terrorism Trade-off

This project looked out how the Bush Administration deliberately starved the FBI's criminal enforcement efforts. It won a White House Correspondents Association Edgar A. Poe Award. I've posted it mostly because it's otherwise disappeared down the memory hole. It resulted in the Obama administration adding $1 billion to the FBI's budget.

TexElex

This interactive election results explainer included at lovingly crafted result pseudo-Dorling cartogram. Each race and each county there had a page combining graphics and algorithmically generated text about election results. It won awards from SND and the Texas APME. This link is to the page for the 2014 governor's race.