2026-04-02 01:06:12
For the New York Times, Ruth Igielnik and Katherine Chui charted presidential approval ratings against gas prices in the United States. The two metrics used to correlate strongly, but it’s grown more noisy over the past decade. That might change back:
Polarization, he said, plays a large role in that change.
“Presidents have fairly unified support from their own party, and unified opposition from the other party, which means they have a higher floor and a lower ceiling,” he said, referring to approval ratings.
Still, the current gas spike could be different. The quick pace with which prices have jumped may be enough to upend that trend.
Gas prices in the U.S. have increased to over $4 per gallon. Here in California, some gas stations are charging over $7 per gallon. Maybe we’ll find out if there’s a threshold for gas prices that lowers the approval floor.
Tags: approval, economy, gas, New York Times, prices
2026-04-02 00:32:28
Artemis II launches today, scheduled for 6:24 pm EDT. Die Zeit mapped the journey to the moon and back (paywalled). Illustrated to scale and focused on the spacecraft while scrolling, it feels like the opening to space documentary. It just needs a soundtrack and an even-keeled astronaut to narrate the wonders of the universe.
Tags: Artemis II, moon, scale, space, Zeit
2026-04-01 19:20:47
Researchers at Stanford University, epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo, estimated the number of people who would die or be disabled if vaccines were no longer available in the United States. They did this for four diseases: polio, measles, rubella, and diphtheria. ProPublica illustrated the scale of these estimates, if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got his way.
Not ideal.
Tags: modeling, ProPublica, scale, vaccination
2026-03-31 18:58:23
For Bloomberg, Loren Grush, Sana Pashankar, and Stephanie Davidson describe the Artemis II plan for the evening of April 1.
The mission is a critical milestone in NASA’s ambitious Artemis campaign, aimed at landing humans on the moon once again. In Greek mythology, the goddess Artemis is the twin of Apollo – a nod to the predecessor program that put US astronauts on the lunar surface. This time, however, NASA hopes to establish a base there, where humans can live and work.
The rocket was illustrated with Blender and flight paths are shown with Three.js. I always appreciate a bit of 3-D flourish in space-related illustrations.
2026-03-31 16:44:23
Four astronauts are rocketing to the moon on April 1. They’ll spend 10 days orbiting Earth a few times, head out to the moon, circle around, and then come back. Marco Hernandez and Kenneth Chang, for the New York Times, have the illustrations showing the rocket specifications, flight path, and the crew module with the space of two whole minivans.
Tags: Artemis II, flight, moon, New York Times, space
2026-03-30 19:04:56
A so-called shadow fleet of tankers transport oil illicitly around the world. They had been on the decline, but the conflict in Iran has changed things. Financial Times mapped the paths and tactics used by these old ships to avoid detection.
These views from above make me think it won’t be long until ship tracking and detection systems are all just based on satellite images. That’s gotta be a thing by now.
Tags: Financial Times, oil, shipping
