A Field Guide to This Site

This is a sample piece that exercises every feature of the site. Read it as a checklist: each section names a feature, shows it working, and says what to try.

Links between pieces

Hover this link to What GDP Actually Measures and a card shows its title, date and reading time. At the bottom of that piece, this guide appears under Mentioned in. Links to published writing such as A Place to Think work the same way.

Margin notes

On a wide screen, footnotes sit in the margin beside the line that cites them.¹ Hover the number and its note lights up.

Sources

Every outside link, such as FRED¹ or the Bureau of Labor Statistics², gets a small number in the text and is collected in a numbered list of sources at the end.

Live charts

The chart below refreshes itself from FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data service. The line under it says how recent the data is.

Quote cards

Select any sentence in an essay and turn it into an image you can share.

Try it: highlight the sentence above, then press Quote card.

Search, Now and series

Press / on any page to search everything. The Now page, which appears in the menu once it has something on it, shows what I am working on and what came before. Reading the Economy is a four-part series; each part shows where it sits and links to the next.

What only you see

While signed in, you can open drafts like this one at their real address, see version history on published pieces, and turn on email signups by adding a Buttondown username in Profile.