Optimism & urgency, year by year
Each point is the average of every issue published that year. A year with no issue in the corpus is simply absent — no line is drawn across a gap.
Highest urgency
The most crisis-driven issues in the run.
Highest optimism
The most triumphant issues in the run.
Lowest optimism
The heaviest, most grim-toned issues.
A mood, not a metric.
This is a research measure, not a scientific instrument — each score is one AI's read of an issue's overall tone, not a claim about any individual writer's feelings. It's offered as a new way to see seventy years of the community at once: where it held steady, and where the ground moved.
Explore the archive →Concept sample: optimism, urgency, and register scored automatically per issue by AI reading the complete OCR text, on 1–5 scales. Subject to JEMA editorial review before any publication.