Essays
Writing
Essays and data stories on measurement and evidence, and on the gap between how decisions are meant to be made and how they are actually made.
On the Record
Maturity Gap: Young Adults, the Legal System, and the Data Between Them
A data story in a dozen chart forms, showing that the years the legal system is busiest are the same years in which the capacities it assumes at 18 are still developing.
Read the data story →A Right That Exists on Paper: Compassionate Release
Compassionate release is on the books in almost every state and almost never used. A data story on the distance between the law and its use, built entirely from public records.
Read the data story →Cultivating a Court's Data STORY
Trends in State Courts, 2025
Most court data is buried in reports that go unread. A field guide for turning administrative numbers into something a judge, a funder, or a community will read and remember.
Read the chapter →In the Works
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Data Storytelling
What Hip-Hop Taught Me About Construct Validity
Try to score something people argue about, like rap lyricism, and every flaw in your workplace metrics becomes easy to see.
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Metrics · Policy
When the Metric Becomes the Policy
How measurement choices quietly become legal and organizational ones, and why that matters for anyone who builds or uses performance measures.
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Aging · Measurement
How Old Is Old? The Age the Law Pretends to Know
The legal system pins hard numbers (18, 50, 65) onto a boundary that the science of human development never draws. A short piece on turning a fuzzy category into an exact number.
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Prediction · Risk
Trust the Checklist: Why Expert Judgment Keeps Losing
Decades of research find that simple statistical rules match or beat expert judgment most of the time, in pretrial risk, clinical practice, and elsewhere. Why we keep trusting our gut anyway, and what that costs.