We humans love to count. Our salary, our weight, the number of jellybeans there are in a jar – and, of course, the number of times that the Earth has gone around the sun. As the data and math editor, it’s my job to help scholars tell the stories behind the numbers in everyday life. This year, through statistics, graphs and maps, we explored explosive issues, from the rural-urban divide to 4th of July fireworks. As another year ticks by, I also took a look back at some of our infographics from 2017 – and they were diverse. Researchers at Stanford University scoured millions of internet comments to understand why people troll. Andrew Kolodny at Brandeis University used data to explore America’s tragic opioid crisis. Another study checked the resumes of thousands of business leaders to bust a major myth about college dropouts. Read my list of favorite charts to revisit them all. Aviva Rutkin

Speaking of myth busting, behavioral economists have been big in the news this year, particularly after one of their pioneers, Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, won a Nobel prize. The burgeoning discipline focuses on integrating the way humans actually behave with economics, a field that traditionally assumes people always act rationally. (Did someone say “bitcoin”?) Thaler, Harvard’s Cass Sunstein and others have learned otherwise, and have used these insights to improve government policies to enhance citizens’ welfare, such as by increasing participation in retirement plans or tweaking nutrition labels to make them more effective. And the stories we publish on the topic tend to be among the most interesting ones I work on because they show, so clearly, how the work of scholars and economists affect our lives and can make them better. They’re also some of the most popular articles I edit. Here’s a handful of stories I published on the topic of behavioral economics this year and why the field matters. Bryan Keogh