Quoctrung Bui

Earlier this month, we told the story of how the share of women studying computer science plummeted in the early 1980's. After that story aired, lots of you asked us what the gender breakdown was for other majors. Here it is:

Last week, we did a story on how stocking costumes can be a tricky business. Richard Parrott of Ricky's NYC, one of the biggest costume shops in New York, told us he needs to find the perfect mix of old favorites and hot new pop culture trends. This year ...

We've written a lot about how income has changed (or not) for the rich, middle class and poor in the U.S. We've written much less about what the rich, middle class and poor actually do for work.

To remedy that, we made this graph. It shows the 10 most ...

With midterm elections three weeks away, it’s political ad season.

This year, things are getting interesting with a couple of fear-mongering ads featuring Ebola.

One ad, paid for by the Agenda Project Action Fund, features Grim Reaper-esque heavy breathing punctuated by gruesome photos of Ebola victims in order to drive ...

Here's the story of income inequality in America over the past 40 years.

Hover over each line to identify household income, and click through to see the percentage growth over the past 40 years.

The graph reveals a striking pattern. After adjusting for inflation, income was basically flat for households ...

There are animals famous for their songs. Whales sing. Birds sing. We humans have Aretha, Elvis, Ray Charles, Pavarotti. But bats — who knew?

Bats produce "pings" or "clicks," right? They make these high pitched sounds, too high for us to hear, but when their cries ricochet off distant objects, the echoes tell them there's a house over there, a tree in front of them, a moth flying over on the left. And so, ...

It's been five years since the recession ended, and the unemployment rate in most states is still higher than it used to be.

Here's a state-by-state look at how unemployment in the years before the recession compares with unemployment now.

A few striking things about the graph:

• Even before ...

Researchers often look at the number of hours worked, but rarely do they ask the question of when. Fortunately, the government conducts an annual study called the American Time Use Survey that tracks how people spend their days.

The interactive graph below shows the share of workers who ...

Restaurants and hotels are posting new job openings faster than they can fill them. This is a promising sign for the economy.

Many jobs in the hospitality industry have low pay but don't require specialized skills. So they often serve as a stopgap for people between jobs. In periods when ...

Inequality is rising in the U.S. You know this. As the graph below shows, incomes since 1988 have been flat for poor and middle-class people, and rising for the upper-middle-class and, especially, for the wealthy.

A bunch of causes are commonly cited for rising inequality. One is globalization: Competition from ...

Pharmacists and doctors are more likely than the general public to buy generic medicine, as we reported last year. And chefs are more likely than the general public to buy generic food.

The economists who figured this stuff out recently published a new update (PDF) to ...

Millennials are the most populous generation in America.

From a demographic perspective, this is very good news for the nation. It means the U.S. has a wave of people just entering the workforce, whose tax dollars (hopefully) will support the retirement of the baby boomers.

Lots of other developed ...

Nadine Gordimer, a Nobel Prize-winning author famed for her portrayals of South Africa under apartheid, died Sunday, her family said in a statement. She was 90.

Gordimer was considered a modern literary genius, an important chronicler of the injustices of racial segregation along with other white writers such ...

This spring, the U.S. finally gained back all the jobs that were lost during the recession. In other words, the number of jobs in the country is now higher than it was back in January 2008, at the beginning of the recession.

But the jobs are different — and they're ...

Are home prices cheap in your city right now?

It's common to answer this question by talking about how prices today compare with prices last year, or to look at how prices in your city compare with prices in other cities.

But there's another way to frame the question: Compare ...

There's this thing people say all the time in New York and other expensive cities: If I could move somewhere cheaper, and keep my income the same, I'd be much better off.

Alas, in places where the cost of living is lower, pay tends to be lower as well.

So ...

In honor of college graduation season, we made a graph. It answers a few questions we had: What is the mix of bachelor's degrees awarded today, and how has the mix changed over the past several decades?

Hover over the graph to see how the popularity of each category changes ...

We often talk about income as if it's this fixed thing. Those people over there are the 1 percent. These over here live in poverty. That other group is the people in the top 20 percent. That's not the way it is.

While economic mobility hasn't increased in this ...

How long does the average person have to work to buy a burger in his or her neighborhood? The maps below answer that question for neighborhoods in six cities around the country.

We used average burger prices and average income by ZIP code to create the maps. The burger data ...