Publications

Our own writing

Everything else here is someone else's journalism, translated. These are pieces written from measurements across the whole archive — things visible only when 30 newsrooms sit in one table.

822 drones: the new price of war

Ukraine sent 822 drones this week. A Shahed costs about $35,000; the Patriot that stops it costs $3 million. That ratio decides more about who wins than the weapons do.

Your phone starts at 1, your calculator at 7 — only one of them was studied

In 1960 Bell Labs tested telephone keypad layouts on people. Then it asked the calculator makers why theirs was upside down. The answer: nobody had ever looked into it.

Why north is up — and why it used to be east

There is no physical reason for north to be at the top of a map. In the Middle Ages, east was. A short history of how a habit comes to look like a law.

The world's news day peaks at 17:00 Baku time

Thirty days, 13,733 articles, 30 outlets. We measured our own archive hour by hour, and the shape that emerged is not the world's rhythm — it is London and New York office hours.

Our own data fooled me: the case of the short headline

I measured 7,872 articles and got a clean answer: long headlines get read less. Then I split the same numbers by outlet and the answer reversed completely. This is statistics' most

143 days: how Azerbaijan lost a letter and took it back

When the new alphabet was adopted in December 1991, the letter ə was not in it. It came back 143 days later. That decision was the technically inconvenient option — and thirty year

Why New York got 212: the city ranking hidden inside phone numbers

In 1947 America handed out telephone area codes, and it did not do so at random. The fewer clicks a code took on a rotary dial, the bigger the city. The result was a hidden ranking

The world is about to stop correcting time — just as Earth starts speeding up

In 2022, governments agreed to stop adding leap seconds by 2035. In those same years the planet unexpectedly sped up. The result may be something never done before: taking a second

75,000 headwords, 289,000 entries: what Azerbaijanis actually want explained

Over fourteen years people have created more than 75,000 headwords in this dictionary. Seven in ten are not words at all — they are sentences, situations, feelings with no name. An

1941: a bomb changed how she spoke, and her neighbours took her for German

When Oslo was bombed, shrapnel struck a thirty-year-old woman called Astrid. When she learned to speak again, she sounded German. She was not speaking any foreign language — the ac

You cannot tickle yourself — and that explains how you see reality

A small oddity: the same touch tickles from someone else's hand and not from your own. Follow that detail and you arrive at the biggest idea in modern neuroscience — the brain does