You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
3 missing chapters
Some of the three rumored missing chapters from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” reportedly deemed too incendiary to publish and the stuff of scholarly myth — and honestly, what is better than scholarly myth? — appeared at auction yesterday. An unpublished chapter was bought by the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for $7,000, along with the manuscript for the book containing its authors’ dense and complex notes. [The New York Times]
20 miles from the White House
The Upshot published a fascinating and fine-grained map of the 2016 presidential election results, introduced with the question, “Do you live in a political bubble?” For example, I learned that my precinct in Brooklyn was in the 87th percentile for Hillary Clinton, but that the nearest Trump precinct is only one block away. President Trump himself, on the other hand, would have to drive 20 miles from the White House to wind up in a precinct that voted for him. [The Upshot]
28 members of Congress
Amazon’s facial-recognition software, called Rekognition (yeesh), falsely matched photos of 28 members of Congress with a mug shot database, misidentifying the legislators as former criminals, according to the ACLU. Amazon claimed that the ACLU hadn’t set the software’s confidence threshold high enough. [NPR]
39 Republicans and 18 Democrats
Depending on how you count, something like 39 Republicans and 18 Democrats in Congress are not running for reelection, my colleague Nathaniel Rakich writes. Of those, 26 Republicans and eight Democrats are ending their political careers altogether. It’s the most “pure” retirements by Republicans and the fewest by Democrats in 10 years. [FiveThirtyEight]
119 of 270 National Assembly seats
Imran Khan, a former cricket star, declared victory yesterday in the parliamentary election in Pakistan. Amid technical problems and accusations of vote rigging, news reports indicated that his Tehreek-e-Insaf party had a commanding lead. Khan promised to fight corruption and to reimagine Pakistan’s relationship with the U.S., which he sees as “one-sided.” [AP]
More than $15 billion
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, lost more than $15 billion. Yesterday. Facebook’s value fell by nearly four times the entire market cap of Twitter. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. [Reuters]
If you see a significant digit in the wild, please send it to @ollie.