Here are select articles from my time at The COVID Tracking Project and as a student journalist at the Columbia Spectator.
Over the course of a year of data collection, the COVID Tracking Project encountered many problems with jurisdictional COVID-19 data. In this article, fellow CTPer Sara Simon and I give a summary of those problems.
Although we’d prefer to have precise, real-time, comprehensive COVID-19 data for every US state and territory, the reality is that every metric that each jurisdiction publishes comes with quirks of timing and content that can make precise calculations impossible.
The Department of Health and Human Services' COVID-19 testing data does not line up with state data, revealing deep problems with the US' laboratory data infrastructure.
In 2000, Columbia ran out of space to store its books. The solution to that problem was a gigantic book warehouse (also known as book Cotsco, book IKEA, book heaven, or book purgatory) in New Jersey.
There's a sundial at the center of Columbia's campus that doesn't tell the time. In this podcast episode, I trace the mystery of its missing timepiece—a gigantic silver orb that used to sit atop it—and the student who advocated to bring it back.