Joe Murphy

Are you in TikTok’s cat niche? What 121,000 videos reveal We re-created TikTok’s algorithm based on 1,100 users’ feeds. Explore which topics are in your feed and see what the algorithm is least likely to show you.

We used 1,100 real users' data to help re-create TikTok’s algorithm, and then made a map, allowing you to explore the hidden divides that decide what content you see - and what you don't.
Awesome work by @fox.computer, Leslie Shapiro & @jeremybmerrill.com:
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

Spotify: open.spotify.com/playlist/4J7...
Apple Music: music.apple.com/us/playlist/...
Youtube: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
Pandora: pandora.com/playlist/PL:...
Tidal: tidal.com/playlist/04a...
Amazon Music: music.amazon.com/user-playlis...
Bandcamp: hypem.com/merch-table/...

An oil pastel and digital painting, mostly deep blues and black, with splattery splots of white, kind of evokes a snow storm.

Hi all,
Here’s my annual winter (dark and gloomy, not jolly jolly) playlist, it’s an all-new collection of 135 songs from artists spanning the globe, posted on six music streaming services (links below and also here: joemurph.com/playlists/de... ). Art by Ada and me.

A dark and dense cloud of dust takes up the left half of the image, with a cluster of glittering white stars at right, all backdropped by many more-distant stars. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Pagan, STScI)

Day 4 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: Hot Stars in the Lobster Nebula. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged this region where the radiation & winds from a group of super-hot infant stars are blasting clouds of surrounding dust. Gift link: www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

Good morning Joe, I just wanted to reach out and say that I found your article on the Christmas tree growth locations to be really neat and that I enjoyed reading it. Have a happy holiday season. Justin

The team put together this nice little article with a map about where Christmas trees come from ( www.nbcnews.com/data-graphic... ) and this morning I got the nicest reader email I've received in a long time.

Saw it described once (in a letter to the editor in Westword, IIRC) as a "trophy-wife piece of architecture."

Hello budding data journalists.

The @NBCNews.com Data / Graphics team is looking for a summer 2026 intern, full-time, $30 / hour, working at 30 Rock in NYC.

The application deadline is Friday Dec. 5 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Details and link to application form below:

gist.github.com/freejoe76/56...

Wholeheartedly recommend Jaclyn Moriarty's Kingdoms and Empires series, it's a thoughtfully fantastical five-book series with a rotating and intermixed cast of kids, plots that layer suspense and detail; we started on book 5 and worked back and can't recommend the fifth book (Lillian Velvet) enough.

The campaign to make Richard Nixon great again The late president, who resigned in disgrace in 1974, actually wasn’t a crook, pundits on the right argue.

Did you know that a bunch of prominent right-wing figures are arguing that Watergate was a “deep state coup” to take down Nixon?

I wrote about how this is happening, and why it worries historians

www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol... @nbcnews.com

Weekly measles cases in the U.S. CDC data plotted by NBC News

The magnitude of the change over time is striking.
www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Credit to @jeremybmerrill.com via @zubakskees.bsky.social for flagging my math error.

[corrected] Turkey facts: Turkeys outnumber humans about 6 to 1 in Minnesota. There are about 32 million turkeys in the state, and around 200 million in the country. The U.S. is responsible for nearly half of the world’s turkeys.

Source: USDA, U.S. Census Bureau.

Ah heck I knew that felt wrong. I fat fingered the calculation, you’re right, it should be about 6 turkeys for dvery human.

Turkey prices hold steady for Thanksgiving Rising bird flu cases have made turkeys more expensive for stores, but consumers are being spared the price pinch.

Somehow, grocery store turkey prices stayed about even with last year, despite an 80% increase in whole-bird wholesale prices. With @EvanBush.bsky.social and Melinda Yao for @NBCNews.com:
www.nbcnews.com/data-graphic...

'Why won't you help me?' Pregnant women and their babies are dying in jail Dozens of pregnant women locked up in county jails described excruciating pain, saying their cries for help were ignored as they miscarried or gave birth into cell toilets or on filthy jail floors.

Big, yearlong investigation from @NBCNews.com landed today:

"Dozens of pregnant women locked up in county jails described excruciating pain, saying their cries for help were ignored as they miscarried or gave birth into cell toilets or on filthy jail floors."

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

This chart shows the number of new international students enrolled in U.S. higher ed each year since 2015, when 300,000 students enrolled. That was the most of any year. Generally, numbers are between 260,000 and 300,000 each year, with exceptions for the first year of the pandemic (145,000) and 2025, when an estimated 230,000 students enrolled, based on preliminary figures.

International student enrollment rates at American colleges and universities fell sharply this year, driven by visa application issues as prospective students are caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

New from Melinda Yao for @NBCNews.com:
www.nbcnews.com/data-graphic...

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

Got another opportunity to use the diagram below in a story, this is some of the best work we've done, just love this illustration so much. #dataViz www.nbcnews.com/science/spac...

A screenshot of the source web page, with a dominant visual of a mandala-like Venn diagram with many colors and shapes swirling around in an almost ordered manner. The page is titled "7 sets Venn Diagram" and has this text on it: "Out of this seven sets Venn Diagram (who's the author?) I created my own isomorphic version (meaning that I kept the same topology) trying to balance surface areas, so each piece has a similar visual importance."

Never seen a seven-set Venn diagram before. moebio.com/research/sev...

NYC! Such a sheen of rainwater left on the sidewalks this AM, so rare for a blue-sky wet-ground morning here, reminded me of growing up in PDX. #rainchat

Small-town preacher shoots one of last lab monkeys that escaped Mississippi crash George Barnett, 45, a church leader and avid hunter, is the second civilian to shoot one of the escaped research monkeys in the past few days.

You don't see a headline like this every day www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Explore How Different New Yorkers Voted for Mayor See how voters turned out for Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa in every neighborhood in the city — and by income, housing and transit preference.

you've got to click around on this map, and the graphics here ... it's astounding. @haidee.bsky.social did such a great job with this:

BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral race, NBC News projects. nbcnews.to/4nIzNUC

Contributed a map to this piece, which looks like a simple county map but was anything but – it took a scrape, a conversion of JSON to CSV, a geocode, then custom a lat-long-to-county lookup script to turn the data published at eyesonflock.com into a map of the counties represented in that data.

This tight-knit community was recovering from a cultlike leader. Then measles got in. Years after the reign of Warren Jeffs, the Short Creek community on the Utah-Arizona border is focused on rebuilding. Missed vaccines were low on the list of priorities, until now.

Here's @erikaedwards.bsky.social for @NBCNews.com on the site of the second-largest measles outbreak in the U.S. this year www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Assemblies of God churches shielded accused predators — and allowed them to keep abusing children NBC News uncovered a 50-year pattern of sex abuse, silence and cover-up in the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.

We spoke to dozens of survivors, read thousands of pages of court and police records, identified 200 alleged church abusers across decades.

Our investigation reveals a 50-year pattern of sex abuse, silence, complacency & cover-up in the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.

Read it here:

The Interview Assassin: Why Isaac Chotiner doesn’t mind the “gotcha” label. Why Isaac Chotiner doesn’t mind the “gotcha” label.

Yesterday I was telling my daughter about @ichotiner.bsky.social and the power of a good question (and a good follow-up)... and today this excellent Q&A with the guy lands. www.cjr.org/the-intervie...

Atop this bar chart is the text "The average price of a bag of Halloween candy increased from about $9 to more than $16 in five years, an increase more than triple the rate of inflation." This chart compares the average price of a bag of Halloween candy (in dollars) each year from 2020 to 2025, showing actual prices and inflation-adjusted prices. In 2020, both prices were $9.19. In 2021, the inflation-adjusted price was $9.69, while the actual price was $9.91. In 2025, the inflation-adjusted price is $11.47 — a 25% increase — and the actual price reaches $16.39 — a 78% increase. The chart shows that while inflation-adjusted prices increase gradually, actual prices rise much faster.

Halloween candy is getting expensive, and it's not just chocolate driving up prices, which have increased in the past five years at more than triple the rate of inflation. Melinda Yao for @NBCNews.com: www.nbcnews.com/data-graphic...

Love the U.S. Religion Census, the people behind it are great, and fun fact: The U.S. Census Bureau used to ask about religion on the decennial census, but then they stopped (in 1960, I think), and that's why the U.S. Religion Census was created, to pick up the slack in that data reporting.

Want to run the world's top marathons? Good luck getting in. Fueled by the rise of run clubs, social media influencers and a growing interest in wellness, demand for marathons has surged in recent years.

With skyrocketing demand, races are struggling to scale.

I went behind the scenes of the world's top races to understand why it's so hard to get a bib, and see how they were trying to keep up.
www.nbcnews.com/sports/track...