In 2016, Barack Obama gave a commencement address at Howard University, where he said If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you w...

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When I go crawling around in data from the General Social Survey, sooner or later I run into Ryan Burge, who writes Graphs About Religion. In his most recent post, he wrote about changes in interperso...

The median daily income where countries drop below replacement fertility has fallen from about $32 per day in 1950 to about $8 now.

Yesterday I presented a talk at ODSC East 2026, called “Counterfactual Analysis with Bayesian Models: What Drives the Life Expectancy Gap?” Here’s the abstract Across nearly every country in the world...

Since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked respondents: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” The fo...

I’m happy to report that Probably Overthinking It is available now in paperback. If you would like a copy, you can order from Bookshop.org and Amazon (affiliate links). To celebrate, I’m publishing Th...

A recent Reddit post asks “Amateur athletes of Reddit: what’s your ‘There’s levels to this shit’ experience from your sport?” Responses included: We have some good runners who can win local races … An...

Once in a while, a few of the Scicloj freinds will meet to learn about signal processing, following the Think DSP book by Allen B. Downey, and implementing things in Clojure. Our notes will be publish...

At Olin College recently, I met with a group from the Kyiv School of Economics who are creating a new engineering program. I am very impressed with the work they are doing, and their persistence despi...

I like Simpson’s paradox so much I wrote three chapters about it in Probably Overthinking It. In fact, I like it so much I have a Google alert that notifies me when someone publishes a new example (or...

**A future of data science** *Allen Downey* In the hype cycle of data science, I suggest that the "peak of inflated expectations" was in 2012, the "trough of disillusionme

On most issues, gender gaps are small and not much different among young and older people

I’ve been thinking about Think Linear Algebra for more than a decade, and recently I started working on it in earnest. If you want to get a sense of it, I’ve posted a draft chapter as a Jupyter notebo...

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The most recent data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) provides a first look at people born in the 2000s as young adults and an updated view of people born in the 1990s at the peak of t...

But like many women, they have mixed feelings about feminism.