The September Trade Deficit Rose 2.1%. Census Marked It Statistically Unmeasurable — Anyway.

National payrolls rose by 29,000 in September 2026, and the unemployment rate held at 4.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's the headline. Scroll down to…

In early August, election workers in Stevens County, Washington, walked across the street to check a mailbox for late primary ballots. They expected a few dozen. They found more th…

Here's a number that sounds great until you ask what it's measuring: 94%. That's the accuracy rate the Department of Veterans Affairs attached to its October 15 announcement that i…

A grocery store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 cans of Monster Energy to four strangers with the same accent, who paid with 25 different cards that looked like ho…

Here's a number that never makes it into the press release: 65,000. That's the population threshold the Census Bureau uses to decide which places get a 1-year estimate from the Ame…

Here's the sequence, in order: a company writes its own safety study. The company sends that study to the regulator deciding whether to approve the company's product. The regulator…

On October 7, the WHO Director-General told reporters the Congo Ebola outbreak stood at 8,665 confirmed cases and 4,178 deaths, with signs of slowing in some areas and continued gr…

Here's a number you won't see in a headline: for every unemployed American in September 2026, there is now roughly one open job. Not two. Not 1.5. One. That's not a crisis number.…

Here's a sentence that should make you nervous every time you read it in a news story: "Only 1 in 6." It sounds damning. It's also meaningless unless you know what the 6 is made of…

Here's a gift for anyone who wants to stop reading press releases: the Census Bureau just published a headline figure and then, in the same document, told you not to trust it. The…

Here's a number that should stop you: in 2025, the world reported fewer cholera cases than the year before, and 30% more deaths. Not a typo. Not a rounding quirk. The WHO's latest…

Here's a number that sounds damning: the case fatality rate for the Ebola outbreak caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo now stands at 48.1%, according…

The Census Bureau announced this week that real median household income hit $87,460 in 2025, up 2.6% from 2024 and the highest figure since the Bureau started tracking it in 1967.…

When I wrote about the Census Bureau's noncitizen voting report on September 18, the story was about a headline number — 24,000 — doing more political work than the underlying meth…

A clip from a 2022 panel discussion is circulating again on social media. In it, an attorney claims that miscarriage and cancer rates tripled and that neurological conditions rose…

The headline from the BLS August import/export price release is that U.S. import prices rose 7.0% in the 12 months ending August 2026. That's a real number. It's also the wrong pla…

A government report cites a number. The number gets picked up by news outlets. The number becomes a policy rationale. And buried somewhere in the footnotes is the fact that the num…

A number arrived in August with the full visual authority of the United States Census Bureau behind it: 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in the 2020 presidential election. Presid…

The headline from the August employment situation was easy to write: unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1%, 569,000 net new employed persons, participation rate ticking up 0.2 points…