Data
“I wanted this man on my side. He had access to data.”
—Don DeLillo, White Noise
“Mondaugen set out for his turret and oscillograph, and the comforts of Science, which are glacial and few.”
—Thomas Pynchon, V.
I track lots of things beyond art consumption—restaurants, haircut cadence, biking miles, illnesses—but my centerpiece project is my Friend CRM.
Friend CRM
Here’s the tweet thread from when I launched this project in the first year of COVID, explaining the original intent: namely, contact tracing and deliberate planning of hangouts when they got harder to do. And I never stopped tracking—the data is current through today!
It seems like a new article about the loneliness epidemic pops up virtually every month in mainstream publications. I’ve been amused to see when friend tracking specifically gets vindicated. Here’s just one example, from The New York Times Style Magazine, January 29, 2026: “Some even like to keep a log of their latest interactions with friends, to make sure too much time doesn’t elapse between catchups.”1
Job tenure
I’ve had two instances where two back-to-back jobs really represented a single role: Northwestern (Kellogg) and University of Chicago (Chicago Booth) were essentially the same role under one research group, and Thinx and Kimberly-Clark were essentially the same role because of the latter’s acquisition of the former. When I calculate my average tenure, which is 2.18 years (Typical millennial in tech? Who knows?), I thought it made the most sense to combine these jobs.
Tweet times
In November 2024, The Economist did a visualization of Elon Musk’s time of day while tweeting. I saw another Twitter user do this with his own historical data export—and since I’m such a big Twitter fan, I had to make my own version as well.