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Significant Digits For Thursday, May 24, 2018

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news. The rest of this week we’ll have a different guest FiveThirtyEight-er posting each day. Today it’s social editor Meena Ganesan.


4 Republican signatures

A group of moderate Republicans in the U.S. House is trying to force a vote to protect undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The “discharge petition” has 21 signers but will need 25 Republicans (and all Democrats on board) to force a vote. Thirteen of the signers represent the most Hispanic Republican districts or ones that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. [The Washington Post]


15 years

The fifth season of “Arrested Development” will debut May 29 on Netflix, nearly 15 years after the show first aired on Fox in November 2003. One of the stars, Jeffrey Tambor (who plays George Sr.) was accused of sexual misconduct on the set of “Transparent” as “Arrested Development” was wrapping up. He and the rest of the “Arrested Development” cast sat with reporter Sopan Deb from The New York Times for a very raw conversation that dropped yesterday. Actress Jessica Walter (who plays Lucille Bluth) described a time her onscreen husband, Tambor, verbally abused her on set. When Jason Bateman (who plays Michael) explained it was typical behavior of certain people in the entertainment industry, his colleague Alia Shawkat (who plays Maeby) said, “But that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.” [New York Times]


20 years

WASHINGTON WAS #ALLCAPS LAST NIGHT. The Capitals won Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals, beating the Tampa Bay Lightning in a 4-0 shutout and earning them their first trip to the Stanley Cup finals since 1998. Dreams do come true, Alex Ovechkin. [ESPN]


24 female CEOs

The number of female chief executives this year declined by 25 percent, according to Fortune’s 2018 list. There were 32 female Fortune 500 chief executives in 2017. Now there are 24. [Fortune]


722 injuries

More than 10,000 employees work at Tesla. In 2017, according to an investigation by Reveal, the company recorded 722 injuries — with the rate of serious injuries requiring time off that’s 30 percent worse than the industry average in 2016. Yes, it’s this investigation, published last month by the editorial arm of the Center for Investigative Reporting, that may have also helped siren that somewhat unhinged Twitter meltdown yesterday by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” Musk wrote, later adding that he’d start a website that would allow users to “rate the core truth” of articles and editors. As you might imagine, Media Twitter was not happy. [Reveal, Twitter]


800,000 couples

In the U.S. last year, more than 2.2 million couples tied the knot, while more than 800,000 couples got divorced. In the monogamy episode from Vox’s new Netflix series, “Explained,” we learn that monogamy is actually a relatively new thing. Humans likely lived without it for 250,000 years, according to some historians and evolutionary biologists. So why do we want it so desperately now? [“Explained” by Vox/Netflix]


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Meena Ganesan was a senior editor at FiveThirtyEight.

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