Stories

Puzzler: What Will Bert and Amy Name Their Kid?

Bert and Amy Cruz are celebrating the birth of their fourth child. Their first three children are named Ivy, Dewy and Bev. Which of the following names will they choose for their newborn boy?

The 13 High-Paying Jobs You Don’t Want to Have

A passion for cleaning teeth might not be the main draw into dentistry, according to the results of TIME’s quiz What Job Best Matches Your Personality? In fact, many high-paying jobs attract people whose personalities are less-than-ideal matches for their profession.

Do You Eat Like a Republican or a Democrat?

Using exclusive data provided by Grubhub, an online food delivery service that partners with restaurants all over the country, we examined the aggregate ordering patterns of customers across nearly 200 congressional districts. Out of 175 popular items ordered on Grubhub, 75% had significant correlations to the partisanship of those districts. The following quiz tests the politics of your diet by presenting you with 10 choices between pairs of dishes with the strongest political affinities.

Find Out What Job Best Matches Your Personality

Developed in partnership with the Workplaces and Virtual Environments Lab at George Washington University, the following interactive will ask you twenty simple questions about what sort of activities you might enjoy doing. It will then compare your interests with nearly 1,000 job profiles to find the one that most closely matches your personality.

Quiz: Could You Be a National Spelling Bee Champion?

Listen to 2006 Spelling Bee champ Kerry Close pronounce each word, then take a stab at spelling the word yourself. We’ll award partial points if you get close. Try all 10 words to see how you score.

Find Out If Your Name Was Ahead of Its Time

To find out how popular your name was when you were born—and how it has fared since then—enter your gender, birth year and first name into this interactive. We’ll tell you which of eight categories your name fits into based on your birth year, like “trendsetter,” “Mr. or Ms. Popular,” or even a “snowflake”—a name that was never common.

Why Ted Cruz Loves The Sound of Music

Here is a list of the top 10 shows where the 2016 candidates are advertising, as well as the 10 shows each candidate has uniquely targeted—that is, the shows where the candidate has the biggest share of all the political ads.

How to Tell If You’re On a Date or Just Hanging Out

The results of Motto’s “Is it a date or not?” quiz are in, and thanks to the 92,000 responses we received, we were able to build a formula to predict when a hangout is perceived as a date. This calculator applies that model to thousands of possible situations.

Watch How the Drug Overdose Epidemic Spread in America

The epidemic of drug overdoses in the U.S. has reached crisis levels, according to newly published data from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps project. The following map shows the spread in per-capita drug overdoses from 2002 to 2014, the most recent year for which data is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

See Whether Republicans Can Stop Trump With This Delegate Calculator

At Thursday night’s Republican debate in Florida, conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt asked John Kasich what should happen in Donald Trump fails to amass the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. “You know, math doesn’t tell the whole story in politics,” Kasich said as he largely dodged the question. What the delegate […]

Can You Put All 44 Presidents in the Right Order?

With all eyes on the people running to replace President Barack Obama in the White House (and the annual holiday celebrating our Presidents around the corner), now’s as good a time as any to test your knowledge about all the men who preceded the current occupant of the Oval Office. Take the quiz and then […]

Is This a Date? Take Our Quiz to Find Out

You will be presented with 10 random scenarios that might or might not be considered a date, and you get to choose for each one if you think it counts as a date. When you’re done, you’ll see what percentage of other Motto readers made the same determination.

See What People in Every State Are Giving Up for Lent

Christians across the country began observing Lent this week, and many marked the period of penance, which lasts until Easter, by choosing something to give up. That choice varied from state to state, with Alaskans vowing to take sweets off the menu, New Yorkers pledging not to drink alcohol and Californians promising to give up […]

How Valuable Is Your Primary Vote?

Candidates are nominated at the conventions this summer not based on the share of the vote they’ve won but on the number of delegates allotted to them through voting. We devised a simple formula to measure the impact of each state’s ballot.

How Much Would You Make if You Were a Man?

We analyzed the wages earned by more than 15 million Americans surveyed by the Census Bureau between 2008 and 2012, who were classified into 460 different occupational categories. We found that 372 of those occupations contained enough information to determine that there was a statistically significant gender pay gap in at least one of the seven age ranges we examined.

See All the Places Where the Zika Virus Has Spread

Updated: Feb. 4, 2016 The epicenter of the Zika outbreak is in Brazil, but the virus has also spread to 29 other countries, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare the cluster of birth defects linked to Zika a global public health emergency this week. That designation will help expedite research on Zika’s link […]

See the Entire History of the Oscars Diversity Problem in One Chart

Last week’s Oscar nominations have sparked outrage for their lack of diversity with zero non-white nominees in the acting categories for the second year in a row. An analysis of the full 92-year history of the Academy Awards shows that Hollywood’s highest honors have lagged the population on issues of race and representation. In all, […]

Here’s How Americans Are Failing to Meet Dietary Guidelines

The new dietary guidelines released by the federal government on Thursday aren’t very new at all—in fact, one of the criticisms is that they don’t go far enough in encouraging Americans to change how they eat, particularly in light of the twin epidemics of heart disease and type-2 diabetes. In describing the guidelines to reporters, […]

Here’s Where the Federal Government Owns the Most Land

A group of armed men in Oregon seized an empty federal building over the weekend in protest of Dwight and Steven Hammond’s prison sentences for arson on federal land, drawing new focus to the millions of acres of land the U.S. government owns across the country. Tensions have long simmered over the fact that the […]

See the Most Googled Person in Each Country in 2015

People are really, really curious about Kim Kardashian and Lionel Messi. The Keeping Up with the Kardashians reality TV star and the Argentine soccer player each earned the distinction of being the most-searched person in 26 different countries in 2015, tying for first place in a ranking Google provided to TIME. Kardashian was the most-searched […]

These Are the Most Popular Secret Santa Gifts in Every State

Google provided TIME with the most disproportionately searched Secret Santa gift in each state. They range from the mundane (scented candles in Alaska, personalized ornaments in Michigan) to the truly unusual (Montana is still into Tamagotchi, while in Massachusetts people are giving one another “angry cat gifts”).

How Diverse Is Your School?

Protests over racism on campus have erupted at colleges nationwide. Students from Massachusetts to Missouri are demanding their schools confront racism of the past by renaming buildings commemorating advocates of slavery and of the present with calls for changes on campus, like university faculty that’s more representative of the student body. Among degree granting colleges […]

The History of the Coke Bottle in 100 Patents

The original Coca-Cola bottle was patented 100 years ago this week, marking the beginning of a century of innovations on the packaging around the iconic beverage. The following interactive displays 100 of the company’s interesting and sometimes downright wacky variations that the bottling giant has patented since 1976, the earliest date when the U.S. Patent […]

See Which College Majors Lead Graduates to Their Parents’ Basements

TIME examined five years of Census data on those with Bachelor’s degrees, accounting for both their field of study and whether they are listed as living with at least one parent.

How Race Influences Why People Die in America

In the latest analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association of a massive amount of government-collected health data from 1969 to 2013, there’s good news. The death rate among Americans, at any given age, from all causes decreased by 43% from 1969 to 2013. In fact, of the six leading causes of […]

See Who 2012 Political Donors Support Today

A TIME analysis of Federal Election Commission records indicates that, while donors to Barack Obama in 2012 have largely transferred their support to Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney’s donors are divided in their support of the 2016 hopefuls.

America’s Fittest Places

Want to find an open treadmill? Better head to Virginia. In Fairfax City, Virginia, located outside of Washington, D.C., there are more than ten times the numbers of gyms per capita than the national average, making it the number-one gym destination in the country. Two other Virginia counties  – Falls Church and Williamsburg – also fall in […]

The Changing Face of American Marriages

Mixed-race marriages are growing at rapid rates, according to a TIME analysis of Census data. This interactive chart shows marriage rates for any combination of race or ethnicity and gender of each spouse.

How America Let Criminals and the Mentally Ill Buy 55,887 Guns

The recent shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College, which claimed 10 lives in one of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings in recent years, has brought new scrutiny to the ease with which anyone can purchase a gun in America. Authorities say that the 26-year-old gunman Christopher Harper-Mercer purchased the 14 weapons he owned legally. This […]

Hollywood’s Glaring Gender Gap

While male actors see their careers peak at the age of 46, female actors reach their professional pinnacles at age 30, according to a TIME analysis of the careers of over 6,000 actors and actresses.

America’s Wealth Map

As politicians, pundits and popes are fond of reminding us, there is a large disparity in the distribution of wealth in the United States. What they don’t mention is that there is also a geographic one.

See Which Pope Traveled the Most

Though Francis became the first pope to address the U.S. Congress Thursday, he’s the fourth to make a papal visit to the U.S. Fifty years ago in 1965, Paul VI first flew to the states, followed by John Paul II’s seven trips from 1979 to 1999, and Benedict XVI’s only trip in 2008. Click on […]

See the Change in Catholic Population Around the World

Over the past 115 years, the global Catholic population has more than quadrupled, from 266 million in 1900 to 1.2 billion in 2015.

Is It Fall Yet?

Autumn may officially behind on September 22 or 23, but it often feels like the weather takes a few weeks to get the memo. See when fall arrives in your neighborhood.

How Marco Rubio is Winning the Republican Twitter Primary

We can find one clue to the tangled GOP primary allegiances in which candidates a person follows on Twitter. TIME Labs examined the 6.2 million people who follow at least one of the 16 candidates and looked at the overlaps for anyone who followed more than one.

This Map Shows Where Immigrants Send the Most Money Home

In his proposal for stricter security at the U.S-Mexico border, Donald Trump seized on an issue that could make him very unpopular among immigrants: remittances. Remittance payments—money that immigrants send back to their home countries—are one of the latest targets for Trump, who proposed that unless Mexico funds a wall at its northern border, the U.S. […]

Jonathan Franzen’s 50 Favorite Words

Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, which published last week, came as no surprise to fans of the author’s elephantine narratives. “Magisterial sweep is now just what Franzen does,”Radhika Jones wrote in TIME’s review. Close readers might also notice that Franzen goes back and back to the well of a few dozen signature words. His novels […]

See Women’s Progress In the U.S. Military

The Army permanently opened Ranger School to all women this month, just weeks after two female soldiers graduated from the school for the first time. That decision is part of a series of efforts that will expand where and how women serve in the U.S. armed forces. On Jan. 1, 2016, with the repeal of […]

The Most Popular Color in World Flags

For all the talk of American exceptionalism, there is at least one thing that is unexceptional about the United States: it’s flag. The Star-Spangled Banner’s particular shade of red shows up in 14.3 percent of all national flags, making it the second most common color after white. And the dark blue of the American flag’s canton is also shared by 13 other nations.

The 50 Most Caffeinated Colleges

Millions of students return to campus this week preparing for another year of late nights studying and early-morning classes (or just late nights and no studying). Who’s struggling the most to stay awake? Online food delivery company GrubHub, which now serves more than 20 million meals each quarter, analyzed delivery orders sent to more than […]

The 50 Healthiest Colleges in America

You are, they say, what you eat. So as approximately 20 million students head back to college this fall, we got to wondering just what they will be eating. The truth may lie somewhere at the bottom of America’s takeout orders. Online food delivery company GrubHub, which now serves more than 20 million meals each […]

The 25 Richest Stores in America

Trader Joe’s just might be a surer sign of gentrification than Whole Foods, according to nationwide retail data supplied by research company AggData. The median income of households in counties with Trader Joe’s is $62,600–just barely beating that of counties with Whole Foods, but far higher than the 2013 U.S. median income of $52,250. TIME ranked 2,996 chains by […]

See the Ratio of Single Men to Women Where You Live

It’s a common refrain among the single: There just aren’t enough available men or women in this city. In many cases, it’s true.

Find Out What Country You Drink Like

Do you drink wine like a Frenchman or down milk like a Swede? Use the sliders below to see which country matches your drinking preferences for five different kinds of beverages, according to two studies that measured drinking behavior, country by country, across the globe.

Donald Trump Flight Simulator

Few candidates arriving at tonight’s GOP debate have the option of doing so in their very own Boeing 757. But then again there are few candidates like Donald Trump. According to data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration via a Freedom of Information request, Trump’s two planes—the 757 and his Cessna Citation X—have flown a total […]

Hollywood’s 10 Most Successful Movie Sequels

Surprise, it’s not Star Wars. According to analysis of percent increase in sales over the original feature, the most successful second act in Hollywood since 1960 is The Boondock Saints II (2009), which grossed 300 times more than the first Boondock Saints (1999) when adjusted for inflation. Check out the charts below to see most […]

Find Out if Your State Is America’s Past or Future

Florida today very closely resembles where the nation is expected to be in 2029. Meanwhile, Connecticut is frozen in the demographic amber of 2001 and neighboring Massachusetts looks like the America of 1993. Where does your state fall?

Where’s the Beef?

Online food delivery company GrubHub analyzed millions of meal orders taken in 2014 by Americans in more than 900 American cities and provided the data to TIME, revealing new insights into how Americans covet their burgers.

Find Out How Much Less Sleep You’re Getting Than Everyone Else

Americans may not be so bleary-eyed after all. According to Withings, a maker of health tracking devices, Americans are falling asleep these days at 11:32PM and waking up at 7:22AM—nearly a solid eight hours. Not all states are equal when it comes to getting rest. New York, home to the city that never sleeps, does […]

Find Out What Your Name Would Be if You Were Born Today

See which name had the same popularity in the past year and every decade since 1890 as yours did the year you were born, using newly released baby name data for 2014.