Dan Kopf

The dried, wrinkly black fruit of the pepper plant was once so valuable that peppercorns were used as a kind of currency. These days, the spice remains sought after despite its relative expense, featuring in virtually every meal on dining tables the world over. Demand for peppercorns is high, and rising: as any aspiring chef will tell you, there’s simply no substitute for its pungent taste.

A good proxy for the overall stability of a country is the consistency of its economic growth. It captures various factors that may lead to upheaval like war, financial crises, and political uncertainty.

Every two years, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes its projections on the jobs they expect to grow or decline over the next decade. The point of the projections are to help workers and officials prepare for the future. If an American wants to know whether there will be a job for them if they become a wind turbine technician or a nurse practitioner, these projections suggest that work will be plentiful. For people with their heart set on watch repair or parking enforcement, the numbers are less encouraging.

Ask a couple who’s been together for more than a decade how they met, and you’re likely to hear a winding explanation of whose college roommate was friends with the cousin who introduced them at a party.

In the 1940s, most people in a relationship in the US reported meeting their partner in one of three ways: through family, friends, or school.

Health care jobs are growing fast. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects home health aide jobs to increase by 37% over the next decade, an addition of 300,000 jobs. That would be the fastest rate of growth among all jobs that were done by at least 40,000 people in 2018.

Methodological note: The Quartz break up calculator ™ is based on data from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey, which, starting in 2009, interviewed US couples about their relationships, then brought them back at about one, two, and five years after that to interview them again. (If a member of a couple died, they were excluded from the dataset.) Not all the follow-up interviews took place at exactly one, two, or three years after the first, so those numbers are approximations, and the one-year, two-year, and five-year breakup probabilities were derived from a simple statistical model. 1

It is one of the most profound changes in life in the US, and in much of the rich world. Instead of meeting our partners in school, at work, or through friends and family, many of us now meet them online.

A peculiar thing about cryptocurrencies is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to figure out their actual value, despite having a market capitalization thought to be around $120 billion or more.

When the movie Donnie Darko was released in 2001 hardly anybody watched it. The science-fiction flick starring Jake Gyllenhaal made only made $2 million in theaters (in 2018 dollars). Today, it is considered by many a modern classic—particularly among college kids looking to expand their minds.

Since its founding in 2006, Spotify’s business model has been simple. It takes music owned by musicians and record labels and lets people listen to it for free interspersed with ads or without interruptions for a monthly fee. It passes along most of these revenues to the owners of the music, keeping a cut for themselves.

An English family that recently visited New Zealand made international news for behaving badly. They reportedly littered on the beach, scammed restaurants out of payment, and threatened violence against locals who asked them to change their ways. Their misbehavior struck a chord with New Zealanders, many of whom are wary of a recent influx of tourists.

Unions were once a central force in the US economy. Their steady decline may be having an impact on inequality.

This Sunday (Feb. 3), the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams meet in the Super Bowl, and Americans will gamble an estimated $6 billion on the outcome. There are all sorts of bets to be made this weekend: how many points will be scored, how long the anthem will last, and even what color Gatorade players will dump on the winning coach.

It’s the fruit that cannot be stopped. The avocado, first eaten by humans in Central America as early as 12,000 years ago, is finally spreading to every corner of the world.

The past couple of months have been rocky for the US economy. The stock market has been volatile, and remains below where it was in early November 2018. Productivity has slowed. And now, the country is in the middle of a partial government shutdown that has lasted nearly a month, leaving many federal workers without paychecks, and threatening to delay mergers and initial public offerings. Economists expect the shutdown to take a bite out of GDP growth (paywall).

Youth in the US are far more comfortable than previous generations with people not identifying as either a man or a woman. Almost 60% of those aged 13 to 21—members of “Generation Z”—believe forms that ask about gender should include options besides “man” or “woman,” according to a recently released survey from the Pew Research Center. This compares to half of Millennials (aged 22 to 37) and just over 30% of Baby Boomers (54 to 72).1

Today (Jan. 19), thousands of people across the world will participate in the third annual Women’s March. This time, they will be doing so with specific calls to action.

A tight job market is forcing US employers to pay more for low-skill workers (paywall). From the 4th quarter of 2017 to 2018, weekly earnings grew by 6.5% for the workers who made in the 10th percentile of earnings—that is, people who made more than 10% of those with a full-time job, but less than 90%. That compares to 5% growth for the median worker.

People in the US hold over $1 trillion in credit card debt. Credit cards are the most essential source of day-to-day financing for millions of Americans. Yet little is known about the true demographics of who owns credit cards, how much they charge on them, and whether they pay their balances on time. The information we have is based on surveys, and people are notoriously bad at accurately reporting their finances.

Imagine you are deciding between two different movies. Five of your friends say movie A is nothing special, but definitely above average. Of those same five friends, four tell you movie B is amazing, but one says it is a bit below average and wouldn’t recommend it.

Popular music is shrinking. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Six percent of hit songs were 2 minutes 30 seconds or shorter in 2018, up from just 1% five years before.

Economists often divide the job market into low-skilled, middle-skilled, and high-skilled jobs. Low-skilled jobs are those that just about anyone can do with a minimal amount of training, such as cleaning or working in a warehouse. Middle-skilled jobs are those that take a significant amount of training, but are routine once you learn how to do them, which includes most clerical and manufacturing jobs. Finally, there are the high-skilled jobs that involve a substantial formal education and critical thinking, such as positions in management and engineering.

Charts are a big part of modern life. They are increasingly essential to our work, the media we consume, and the apps we use to track the way we exercise, eat, and sleep.