An unprecedented emigration wave has emptied Cuba of up to a quarter of its population since 2020. The demographic fallout will reverberate for decades to come, affecting any future recovery or political transition.
An interactive map of the New York Times' Metropolitan Diary placed where they happened, 1976–2026.
A guide to creating scrollytelling stories including when the format is worth using, and the different techniques for pulling it off.
Food has increasingly become a tool of war, triggering humanitarian devastation and disrupting global food supplies. International authorities appear incapable of responding.
Drawing from University archives, campus maps, academic literature, and news clippings, the Maroon charted the University's contentious property acquisitions from its charter in 1890 to the present. Featured on the front page of Hacker News and r/Chicago.
Gang warfare, hunger, and a disintegrating health-care chain has hollowed out Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Seven hundred miles away, the U.S. government has revoked TPS, a humanitarian immigration status used by Haitians since the devastating earthquake in 2010. Up to 350,000 Haitian migrants could now be deported to a country beset by violence.
Trump turned tariffs from a response to the China shock into a durable, more sweeping tool of U.S. economic statecraft. Even as courts challenge his methods, future presidents are unlikely to surrender the executive’s expanded trade powers. The result will be a more volatile, bilateral, security-driven trade policy and a weakened WTO. A future pro-trade administration might instead rebuild a smaller system of market economies that excludes China.
The AI race is currently a contest between the United States and China in which private labs increasingly rival nation-states in power and reach. To maintain the United States’ lead, policymakers must build strong relationships with the labs and a regulatory environment that supports innovation; politicizing or overstepping that relationship would slow innovation and erode international trust in American technology.
The United States should not fall for Putin’s gambit to undercut Ukraine. Before agreeing to an extension, it must secure greater verification guarantees and a commitment to further negotiations.
Guyana’s offshore oil discoveries have driven remarkable economic growth and transformed the South American country into a significant energy producer, with implications for regional stability and energy markets, as well as U.S. foreign policy.
What trends are Council on Foreign Relations foreign policy experts watching in 2026? Read about the race for critical minerals, the possible end of arms control, and the rise of the ‘Electrostate’ (plus some visuals I contributed).
The world faces unresolved conflicts, growing climate crises, attacks on aid workers, two famines, and diminishing political will—along with significant aid cuts. Altogether, 2025 has earned a grim new superlative: the worst humanitarian year on record. Read the full article by Sam Vigersky with nine charts I helped create to illustrate the crisis.
For the first time in nearly two decades, a new Pew Research survey shows China is viewed more favorably than the United States in most countries surveyed—but the findings say more about a decline in U.S. soft power than a Chinese surge.
The United States has historically been the single largest donor to the United Nations. However, during his second term, President Trump has reduced U.S. funding, withdrawn from major agencies, and scaled back the country’s involvement in UN initiatives.
The Iran war, immigration enforcement, and the Trump administration’s travel bans have raised the stakes of this summer’s tournament.
The Yemen-based Houthis’ naval blockade against Saudi shipping and their battle with Saudi-backed Yemeni forces for control of the Red Sea’s critical Bab el-Mandeb Strait add a new dimension to the Iran war, with potentially major consequences for the region and the global economy.
A daily game to learn more about your city using open data. Each day you get shown a new data set and either have to draw the trend or rank the boroughs.
Contributed analysis and visualizations behind this Chicago Tribune story.
A powerful, flexible Python package for entity resolution and record linkage. Enables users to load data from various sources, clean and standardize entity names and addresses, and create links between entities based on exact and fuzzy matching techniques.
Never miss the sunset again. An automated system that captures, scores, and displays the best sunset photo from the previous night using computer vision and a Raspberry Pi.
A web app that lets users identify the owner of every parcel of land in Chicago and Cook County, including a MapLibre map of 1.4M building parcels that researchers and journalists can use to explore corporate property ownership in the city.
A web app that allows a homeowner in Chicago to explore their property tax bill, including how it is calculated, what the different components are, and how it has changed over time.
In 2023, the Biden Administration released the first ever Federal AI Use Case Inventory. See how the federal government is using AI.
A web app for a research project that analyzed a unique dataset of over 100 million real-time bus locations in partnership with the Chicago Tribune.
An open-source collaborative tool, currently in development, that turns stories into insights. Community organizations, journalists, researchers, and community members can use it to gather stories, aggregate them, and find the common threads worth acting on.
While the University has an official stance of institutional neutrality, faculty members lean decidedly Democratic. Won 1st place for Graphic Illustrations from the Illinois Collegiate Press Association.
Inspired by an interview with journalist Jamie Kalven, son of Harry Kalven, Jr. of the Kalven Report, the Maroon annotates this oft-cited but little read document.
The New York Times Mini Crossword is a puzzle I have been solving every day since 2016. Over 2,500 puzzles later, a look at my streaks, stats, and progress over the years.
UChicago trustees’ donations to Republican candidates increased considerably in the 2024 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by the Maroon.
The admission rate continues to drop as campus demographics have shifted.
