The Best Times Graphics of 2024

Noah Lyles doesn’t run like other sprinters. When he won gold for the United States in the 100-meter race at the Olympics this summer, he got off to a slow start. During the first 40 meters, he trailed the pack. Only in the final stride did he pull ahead, winning by a fraction of a second.

The margin of his victory was imperceptible to the human eye. So journalists at The New York Times took photographs at 100-millisecond intervals and calculated his speed using a computational technology known as computer vision. You can see the results here.

At The Times, visual journalists are always on the prowl for innovative ways to tell big news stories. Our teams broke down major events by the second (and by the fraction of a second) and mapped data at the neighborhood level. We produced interactive features that helped readers personalize, explore and investigate patterns in the news for themselves.

Here are some standout moments from the year:

• In June, New York’s governor nixed a plan to toll cars entering certain parts of Manhattan. “Congestion pricing,” as the proposal is called, would have paid for subway upgrades. (A more modest version is now set to begin in January.) To see how much money the original plan might have collected from drivers, we sent 27 colleagues to the edges of tolling zones to count vehicles during the morning rush hour. Here’s what we found.

• In March, a container ship struck the Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing its collapse. We used shipping traffic data, satellite imagery and a federal inventory of bridges to identify over 190 vulnerable bridges across the country that also lack the protections they need.

• Fatal shootings surged during the pandemic, and they spread into new places. To find out where, we plotted every gun homicide that took place during the pandemic years on a map alongside demographic data. Click here to explore gun violence in your own neighborhood.

• A.I.-generated content is becoming harder to detect. As A.I. companies trawl the web for new data to train their upgrades, it is more likely that they will ingest A.I.-generated content. What would it look like if a model is trained on its own output? To find out, we showed handwritten numbers to an A.I. and asked it to mimic those digits. Then we fed the result back into the system, over and over again. Click here to see what happened after 20 and 30 generations.

• We used drone photography, satellite imagery and measurements collected on the ground to build a 3-D model of the scene in Butler, Pa., where a gunman shot Donald Trump. That model allowed us to recreate the lines of sight for the would-be assassin and several Secret Service teams — and to see for ourselves the lapses in security

• The government of China has been erecting villages along contested borderlands — and paying people to move there. We worked with an A.I. company to scan satellite images for these new settlements, and then verified the results by looking at historical photos, state media, public records and social media posts. You can see here what they look like and where they are.

• After the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022, more than a dozen states banned the practice. Suddenly, women seeking an abortion often had to travel out of state. We mapped where 171,000 of those women went — for an abortion procedure or to obtain pills — in 2023.

• When Americans relocate, they increasingly choose homes in the country’s South and West. Those regions are also more prone to extreme weather events — fires, hurricanes, floods. Here you can see where they’re moving and what dangers they face.

See more of this year’s strongest graphics, along with an under-the-hood look at their creation.

THE LATEST NEWS

Biden Administration

• Fear, joy and hope: More than 225,000 migrants have entered New York City since 2022. Over eight months, The Times documented life within the shelter system.

• The police detained a man suspected of fatally setting a woman on fire in a subway car.

• The head of the N.Y.P.D., in a crackdown on overtime abuses, has reassigned at least 29 officers. Sixteen had earned more than $100,000 in overtime pay in the last fiscal year.

Other Big Stories

• Japanese automakers Honda and Nissan formally announced the beginning of merger talks.

• Telegram, the lightly moderated social media app, is set to be profitable this year even as it faces legal scrutiny and grapples with billions in debt.

Opinions

Free trade economists have been wrong for decades, allowing the U.S. to fall behind China in industry. Now they’re doubling down, Oren Cass writes.