You’ve no doubt noticed the series of posts linking to The Pudding that landed here in rapid succession. A quick explanation may be in order.

When I linked to how animals sound in various languages, I originally ended it thusly:

Another engrossing piece from the brainy folks at The Pudding.

My plan: To link to my previous entries from The Pudding, but to my utter surprise, those entries did not exist.

Wut?

I double-checked, and sure enough, despite first bookmarking The Pudding in late September 2024—likely after seeing this—and saving several individual stories since, I had indeed neglected to actually share any of those links.

Oops.

The Pudding was new to me, even though they’ve been creating interactive, data- and visualization-driven stories since 2014. I was immediately enamored of their work: unique, engaging stories which start from a place of genuine curiosity and open-mindedness, with a large dollop of data nerdery, and then are presented in novel, compelling, downright fun ways, which help transform mere data into information and knowledge.

Some stories start with a deceptively simple question, a personal observation, or a distinct perspective; others challenge assumptions or resolve personal obsessions; still others aggregate disparate data or simply encourage discovering something new.

In short, The Pudding is perfectly calibrated to flip every one of my nerdy, inquisitive, learning-for-the-sake-of-learning switches. It’s a deeply satisfying, absolutely delightful site, and I’ve spent more hours exploring its rich archives than may be wise to admit.

For those of you who didn’t command-click every inline link above, I’ve collected them here; a Pudding Starter Pack, if you will:

• How do animals sound across languages?
• Deciphering the logic of China’s censorship using one hundred episodes of The Big Bang Theory.
• How You Play Spades is How You Play Life unpacks the African-American experience through the lens of the popular card game.
• A thoroughly engaging exploration of the evolution of the love song.
• Examining “the relationships between the main characters, and the recurring phrases associated with those characters” in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.
• Thousands of satellite photos of basketball courts, because they exist and deserve to be assembled in one place.
• “An exploration of rhythm and grooves that break the rules,” an interactive musical playground decoding “Dilla Time.”

I hope this makes up for not linking to these sooner.

I mentioned above that I first bookmarked The Pudding on September 27, 2024, but that’s not the only link from that day I neglected to share!

Outrageous!

Here’s my dirty little secret: I bookmark way more links than I will ever have time to write about. For every link I share, there are a dozen more I don’t get around to.

In an effort to further assuage my guilt, here is every bookmark from that day:

• AlphaGuess, a word game that is simultaneously enjoyable and frustrating.
• A Mastodon post advocating against adding your government ID to your phone and The Verge story that sparked it.
• A Vulture story on Mapping the Apple TV+ Universe.
• Rudy Giuliani’s DC Disbarment. (Having previously gloated over his New York one, it seemed only fair to mention this one too. I regret not doing so at the time.)
• A WordPress vs. WP Engine think piece about the Wordpress debacle making the internet worse.
• The Verge on X/Twitter ’s decision to block the J.D. Vance dossier and Ken Klippenstein’s decision to publish that dossier.
• NPR’s story about the BBC opening access to their vast library of sound effects.
• A fascinating piece on who should benefit from the nearly 400 million batteries’ worth of lithium sitting in Imperial Valley, CA. (Spoiler: It’s unlikely to be the local community.)
• A maddening story of a Google decision forcing a small independent app developer to kill their Android app.
• Emirates’ No-Nonsense Safety Video (an antidote of sorts to the British Airways’ safety video).
• And my favorite, the very silly 3 Most Popular Cocktails in America (except for Hawaii and Louisiana). (They linked “martini” to a vodka martini recipe. I mean, c’mon people.)

I did manage to share one story I bookmarked that day—Saving the Internet Archive (published three days later)—plus Member Update #3, exclusively for Workshop+ subscribers.

Regrettably, I’ll always be in a deficit—we’re halfway through March and I’ve already captured 260 bookmarks!