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Off the Charts: Happy birthday (to us)!

2026-02-17 · 18:42 UTC ·The Economist ·7 min read

Brief

The Economist’s February 17th 2026 Off the Charts newsletter is mostly a five-year retrospective on its data-journalism practice rather than a single reported investigation. Marie Segger traces the publication from its February 2021 launch during the pandemic through roughly 250 issues covering covid metrics, Ukraine war visualisation, election forecasts, AI tools and open-source intelligence methods. The piece is strongest when it surfaces methodology and newsroom process: early editions explained log scales and vaccine datasets, later ones described tracking diverted flights, using satellite imagery, and building poll trackers, while more recent issues showed how AI has made tasks such as scraping and sentiment analysis easier. The newsletter argues that some techniques remain evergreen despite changing tools, especially principles around outlier handling, colour scales, map projections, georeferencing, and chart design. It also tees up several current Economist analyses, notably a project using an LLM to classify 1.4m Jeffrey Epstein emails and a housing analysis comparing renting versus buying across every US county.

Why it matters

The Economist’s Off the Charts newsletter marks its fifth anniversary by reflecting on roughly 250 weekly issues published since its first edition on February 16th 2021.

Key details

  • The newsletter says its latest major project analysed 1.4m Jeffrey Epstein emails spanning more than a decade, using Jmail.world plus an LLM to score email chains with an “alarm index”; it reviewed 500+ close connections and flagged nearly 1,500 emails as most disturbing.
  • Off the Charts’ editorial arc tracked major events and tools changes over time: 2021 focused on covid-19 datasets such as excess-mortality and “normalcy” trackers; 2022 emphasized Ukraine war reporting with diverted-flight tracking and satellite imagery; 2024 introduced themed data-tips editions starting with AI; and 2025 featured AI and open-source intelligence techniques more regularly.
  • The newsletter highlights enduring technical craft topics in data journalism, including visualising outliers, choosing colour scales, improving bar and line charts, using map projections and georeferencing, and documenting how The Economist’s stockmarket charts evolved since first appearing in 1929.
  • It also promotes current data stories with concrete figures, including a county-by-county US rent-versus-buy analysis, Britain’s reported 1.3% GDP growth in 2025—the fastest since 2022 and third-fastest in the G7—and China’s live-performance box office rising from 20bn yuan in 2019 to 62bn yuan ($9bn) in 2025.
Cleaned source text

title: Off the Charts: Happy birthday (to us)!

author: The Economist

content_type: newsletter

publication: e.economist.com

published: 2026-02-17T12:42:11-06:00

source_url: gmail://19c6ce90b3c4bff3

word_count: 1687

Also: Should you rent or buy?

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February 17th 2026 For subscribers

Off the Charts

The best of our data journalism

Marie Segger

Data journalist and interim special-projects editor

For our latest edition we analysed 1.4m emails sent to and from Jeffrey Epstein over the course of more than a decade. With the help of Jmail.world, a website which hosts many of the emails, and a large language model (LLM), we looked at more than 500 of his closest connections. The LLM scored each email chain on how disturbing its content is, creating an “alarm index”. Epstein did not waste time on middle managers. A quarter of his top non-staff contacts have a Wikipedia page. He traded emails with at least 18 billionaires, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and with celebrities like Woody Allen and Deepak Chopra. The LLM flagged almost 1,500 emails as containing the most unsettling content. Many of those conversations were with young women or little-known accomplices.

More of our data and visual reporting this week:

Should you rent or buy? Well, that depends on where you live. Doug Dowson crunched the numbers for every county in America.

According to the Office for National Statistics the British economy grew by 1.3% last year—the fastest since 2022 and the third-fastest in the G7. James Fransham explained why the numbers are not set in stone.

Two parties won big in recent elections: Thailand’s conservatives and Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party led by Takaichi Sanae, Japan’s first female prime minister. Both secured a surprisingly large share of the vote.

China is enjoying a concert boom. Last year the box-office intake from performances totalled 62bn yuan ($9bn), up from 20bn (roughly $2.9bn) in 2019.

Five years ago this week, we sent the first Off the Charts newsletter. We’re celebrating this milestone with cake in the office—and below we’re taking a walk down memory lane.

Thank you for reading our newsletter. Please send us your feedback at offthecharts@economist.com.

Happy birthday (to us)!

The world was still reeling from the pandemic when we launched this newsletter. In our very first edition, sent on February 16th 2021, Alex Selby-Boothroyd, the head of our data team, explained our efforts to sonify data for “The Jab”, our podcast following the race to vaccinate the world. Since then we have sent Off the Charts every week, with the exception of the odd holiday break (we’re not foolish enough to think you’d be yearning to hear from us post-Christmas dinner).

Time to lean back and reflect on what we’ve written about in the 250-something newsletters we have published since. In our first year we covered a lot of pandemic-related ground. We wrote about our excess-mortality tracker, our covid-risk tracker and explained how to work with vaccine data and properly use log scales. We launched our normalcy index to track how close the world was to returning to pre-pandemic times. And we also tracked Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office as America’s 46th president.

In the early days of the newsletter many editions focused on the covid-19 pandemic

Looking back, the world has changed a lot in the past five years. In 2022 the biggest theme was the war in Ukraine. We wrote about how we tracked diverted flights, used satellite images to assess damage and visualised sensitive data. We also launched two recurring series that year, our ever-popular data tips—which initially just collated recommendations for new R or Python packages, and the odd moment of ingenuity—and our favourite charts editions.

In 2023 war remained ever-present, particularly after the Israel-Gaza conflict erupted in October. In 2024 our data tips became more ordered and we decided on themes for each edition; the first one was on AI. Elections in America, Britain and the EU kept our data team busy, and we explained how we built our poll trackers and election forecasts. We started 2025 much the same when Canadians and Germans went to cast their vote.

Some of the topics we have covered have followed the news. But the tools we use are always evolving, too, and we document these changes in the newsletter. In 2025 AI remained an oft-discussed topic and open-source intelligence techniques also featured regularly. Some of our early editions now feel a little dated: scraping and sentiment analysis can be done much more easily with the help of AI tools. Some feel nascent.

Many of the design principles we have written about remain relevant

My favourite Off the Charts newsletters are the ones that feel evergreen. In our third edition Sarah Leo, one of our visual data journalists, wrote about how to visualise outliers (we have re-published it for this occasion). Although the design of our charts has changed in subtle ways (as Matt McLean, our lead designer, explained at the time), many of the principles we follow remain the same. Editions on choosing a colour scale, by Rosamund Pearce, and explainers on how to take your bar or line charts to the next level, from Helen Atkinson, remain as salient as the day we sent them.

The chart from 1929 bears little resemblance to our modern stockmarket charts

Cartography is another recurring subject. Advice on using the right map projection, georeferencing and showcasing geographical features feel timeless. The behind-the-scenes editions that explain how we hide Kashmir to get our paper distributed in India, how our stockmarket charts have changed since the first one was published in 1929 and how we used to draw _The Economist_ ’s maps without software still offer a unique perspective of the history of data visualisation at our paper.

So what is next for Off the Charts? You tell us. What are the subjects that you would like us to cover? What do you want more—or less—of? Is there a topic you’d like us to give advice on? Let us know and email offthecharts@economist.com. Thanks for reading our data newsletter—whether you’ve been with us for all those years or you’ve just joined the mailing list.

Editor’s picks

A selection of must-read articles

Justice denied

Inside Epstein’s network

What 1.4m emails reveal about America’s most notorious sex offender

America’s housing market

Should you rent or buy?

Our interactive map shows where in America homeownership is becoming more appealing

Growth’s dubious precision

Britain’s shifting GDP numbers

The economy is growing. But how strongly?

Boom times

Why China’s concert scene has boomed since the pandemic

Youngsters are yearning for experiences

Diversity hires

Ethnic minorities are driving America’s startup boom

The covid-19 pandemic set entrepreneurial spirits surging—for some

Of Homer and home ownership

The decline of single-earner housebuyers in America

A tale of opportunities and costs

What our data journalists are reading

▸| Six charts show how Donald Trump is isolating America (_Guardian_)

▸| How the _New York Times_ uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere” (Nieman Lab)

▸| Bad Bunny is rewriting the rules of American popstardom (Reuters)

▸| How Donald Trump sees the world (_New York Times_)

▸| The hotspots where e-bikes clog up London streets (_The Times_)

What search trends tell us about our relationship with birds (Visual Cinnamon)

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