Hello! Welcome to our first newsletter on a new email service called Buttondown! We will no longer be emailing from Substack, so you’ll be unsubscribed from there.

Here are our new projects to share!

• [Essay] We looked at a decade of fanfic couples. See who gets shipped and why. Using 11 years of relationSHIP data from AO3, we break down why fanfic is hella gay and goes well beyond the source material.

• [Help us collect data] Organize these K-pop groups by generation, and we'll make an article using the results.

• [Essay] See how modern stats are reshaping baseball’s batting lineups.

• [Interactive Map] There are 59,507 outdoor basketball courts in the U.S.A. Explore satellite imagery of all of them. This project stitches together aerial basketball court images into a single mosaic for you to explore. We posted a behind-the-scenes to Patreon too.

Thanks for the recent Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!

Who gets shipped and why?

For the uninitiated, "shipping" is the act of creating a romantic pairing between two people or characters who may not already be romantically involved—a truly unique internet phenomena and a predominate theme in fan fiction.

Using 11 years of data from Archive of Our Own (AO3)—one of the world’s largest fanfic sites and compiled by centreoftheselights—we set out to find who gets shipped.

Just like fanfic, this project is told in chapters: 1. Slash, 2. Canon, 3. Real Person Fiction.

Read the three-part essay

Help us sort K-pop groups by their generation

If you love K-pop (or know someone who is a fan), this survey is for you. We’re creating a first-of-its-kind dataset that crowdsources which K-pop groups belong to which generation.

At the end, you can also see how people have answered so far.

Take the survey

The Evolution of Baseball’s Perfect Lineup

For most of baseball history, lineups followed simple rules: speed at the top, sluggers hit 4th, etc. But with the rise of analytics, things are changing.

For example, the leadoff has deprioritized speed and now includes more hitting for power.

The strategy behind constructing a batting lineup has evolved over time, and we’ve crunched the numbers to see how.

Read the essay

Explore satellite imagery of every outdoor basketball court in the U.S.A.

We’re constantly scanning Google Maps, and one thing we love finding are unique basketball courts, like this one featuring a mural of Chadwick Boseman.

The stories behind court murals are fascinating, and playing on them must feel special. And that feeling isn’t limited to paint: there are courts nestled into mountains and on the harbor of NYC’s East River.

The history is beautiful too, if you know where to look. Go to Vernon V. Young Memorial Park in Ardmore, PA, and you can put up a fadeaway and shout “Kobe!”, knowing that you’re exactly where Kobe Bryant played pick-up in high school.

These images (and their stories) truly feel like they should exist in an art gallery. Except there’s 59,507 outdoor courts in the US, and the best way to see them is to pan and zoom on a map.

So on The Pudding, we have a way to drop likes and comments on courts, as well as an easy way to explore satellite imagery by city, state, or even a court’s color.

Explore the interactive and drop a comment
Learn about how we made it on Patreon

Quick asides!

• Have a cool essay idea that you want to make? Check out our pitch guidelines.

• Want to hire our team to produce data-led, visual stories? Check out our sister studio, Polygraph.

#stuffwelove at The Pudding

Here’s also some special links that are regularly shared on our Friends of The Pudding slack-channel (get access via Patreon)!

• An analysis of Seattle’s parking enforcement machine

• Bop Spotter - Riley Walz has an Android phone, randomly hidden somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco, set to Shazam constantly and logging the songs it records.

• A report on the first year of the Pretrial Fairness Act, which eliminated cash bail in Illinois.

Thanks for reading!
The Pudding team