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Significant Digits For Wednesday, May 23, 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.

4 newsrooms

When Farai Chideya, a former FiveThirtyEight staffer, reached out to 15 major news outlets to ask about the diversity of their political units, four newsrooms responded with the data Chideya asked for. Political reporters are predominantly male and white — at least that’s what people assume, but without more transparency we don’t know just how homogeneous the political press corps is. [Columbia Journalism Review]

15 yards

NFL owners are meeting to debate what to do about players who kneel in protest during the national anthem. One of the ideas: a 15-yard penalty for the kneeling player’s team. No decision has been made yet. [Sports Illustrated]

30 years old

How old is too old to live with your parents? For one New Yorker, it’s 30. Michael Rotondo lived with his parents for eight years until a judge on Tuesday ruled that he had to abide by his parents wishes and get a place of his own, already. The Rotondos sent their son five eviction notices, but Michael didn’t feel ready to live on his own. Nevertheless, he’s now evicted. Unconditional love doesn’t always mean unconditional housing, apparently. [CNN]

40 percent

Do you know your neighbor? Your answer may depend on where you live. In a new Pew Research Center survey of adults, 40 percent of rural Americans said they knew all or most of their neighbors, compared to 24 percent of urban Americans. And thus a new American maxim is born: The closer you are to somebody, the further you are from knowing them. [Pew Research Center]

53 percentage points

That was Stacey Abrams’s margin of victory on Tuesday over Stacey Evans in Georgia’s Democratic primary for governor. If she can somehow win in November, Abrams would be the first black woman elected governor in U.S. history. In fact, she’s already the first black woman nominated for governor by a major party. [FiveThirtyEight]

250 votes

The House on Tuesday approved legislation — by a vote of 250 to 169 — that allows seriously ill patients to try experimental treatments (if they get their doctor’s buy-in). The bill was already passed by the Senate, and President Trump supports it, but it does have critics: Some Democrats and patients’ groups fear the so-called right-to-try legislation will harm patients with false hope. [The New York Times]

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If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @FiveThirtyEight.

Chadwick Matlin was a deputy managing editor at FiveThirtyEight.

Micah Cohen is FiveThirtyEight’s former managing editor.

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