The Best Times Graphics of 2024

By Elena Shao

I’m a reporter in the Graphics department.

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:

• 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

Other Big Stories

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.

Keren Munder was a former Israeli hostage in Gaza. Trump’s top priority in his transition to office should be to free the remaining hostages, she writes.

Here is a column by David French on why so many Christians are cruel.