Field note
Soviet continuous work week, 1929
In 1929 the Soviet Union tried to abolish the weekend. The nepreryvka split the workforce into five colour groups on a rotating five-day cycle — four-fifths always working, so the factories never stopped, and no universal Sunday to anchor religious life. The staggering fractured families: pick two people’s colours and watch their days off never line up. Traces the calendar from the five-day week to the six-day shestidnevka to the seven-day week’s return in 1940 — and debunks the two myths the story usually carries.
Field note
Collective rest & mental health
Terry Hartig tracked how many antidepressants Swedish pharmacists dispensed, month by month, for twelve years. The more workers were on vacation at the same time, the fewer prescriptions went out that month — and the effect reached retirees too, who had no job to break from. Evidence that rest is contagious. Rebuilt from the paper’s published ARIMA coefficients: an exact dose-response curve, the drop group-by-group, and a reconstruction of the raw seasonal series.
Field note
Who did the work — agent or human
The workbench measured on itself. Every task I complete is tagged with who did it — agent or human — and this is the two-column readout of that split: outcome rate, dollars per instance, minutes to complete. The agent lane runs ~40× cheaper and 4× faster; the human lane still closes a hair more of what it starts. Fed live at build time from anonymized database views (see the dbt leak gate) that never expose a task title, note, or category.
Field note
Happiness, money & suicide
Three reads on happiness and suicide. The paradox: why happy countries like Finland carry high suicide rates (after Gladwell), on a scatter + world map with a World Cup 2026 lens. Over time: a decade stacked against GDP, where the gap widened and a third of countries grew richer yet sadder. And the decline: world suicide rates fell nearly a fifth since 2000 — happiness never noticed.
Field note
Who has the bomb, 1945–2026
Every nuclear warhead on Earth, year by year since 1945. The stockpile peaked at 64,452 in 1986 and has fallen 85% since — almost all of it the US and Russia dismantling Cold-War arsenals. Flip between total stockpile and the year-over-year buildup/teardown, overlay the arms-control treaties, and isolate any of the nine arsenals on a linked world map. Fed by an FAS/Our World in Data feed that refreshes year to year.
Field note
The productivity–pay gap since 1948
For a generation the typical worker’s pay rose right alongside what they produced. Around 1973 the lines split — net productivity is up +298% since 1948, worker pay only +143% — and the wedge between them is income workers generated but didn’t take home. The setup for the obvious next question: will the AI productivity surge flow back to pay, or repeat the pattern? Fed by EPI’s State of Working America data.
Field note
CEO-to-worker pay, 1965–2024
In 1965 a big-company CEO made about 21 times a typical worker; the ratio peaked at 408:1 in 2021 and sits at 280:1 today. Because executive pay is mostly stock, the line swings with the market — toggle the S&P 500 overlay to see it track. The options-realized measure for the 350 largest U.S. firms, fed by EPI’s State of Working America data — then search a company you know for its own ratio, straight from its SEC proxy.
Field note
Listening loyalty since 2019
Every song I’ve logged since 2019, rebuilt from Tableau as a “mountain range” of my top-15 artists. Not just who I played most, but who I stayed loyal to — each artist climbs for every return inside four days and dips when I let them lapse. deadmau5 never stops climbing.
Field note
The trek west, 1846–1869
The 56,000 Latter-day Saints who walked 1,300 miles to the Salt Lake Valley, rebuilt from Tableau as one themed dashboard. A young people’s migration (58% under 25), cholera as the trail’s defining killer, a U-shaped mortality curve — and the Company Type filter made real: pick Willie & Martin to watch mortality jump to 16.5%.
Field note
Faith, evolution & the mind
Forty-eight religious university students, read back two of their own contradictory survey answers — “Adam & Eve are our universal ancestors” and “humans share an ancestor with apes.” Half saw no conflict at all. Built from a public BYU interview-transcript deposit: the seven moves they use to hold both at once, and a wall of the transcripts verbatim (“we got our latest model, let’s, Adam and Eve let’s go”).
