Us At a Glance is an independent dashboard of signals about life in America: prices and jobs, food recalls and safety alerts, weather and natural hazards, public-health surveillance, drought, political activity and ad spending, national mood, and what the country is searching for and reading about. This tool is built to give a one-page reading of the country, refreshed automatically twice a day.
The Look back tool shows any month back to January 2017: the numbers for that month, the major events near it, and what America was reading. For July 2026 onward it also shows what America was searching for.
Every number comes from one of the sources below. Most are federal statistical agencies. Some are private publishers, named on the page where their data appears. Four readings are calculated here from those sources: national mood, the disruption scale, Main Street activity and travel volume.
The dashboard draws on about seventy feeds. The complete list, with each license, is at the foot of the dashboard.
The Signals panel is generated by fixed rules. Each detector computes a statistic from the sources above, such as a price far from last year's, a recall count far above its yearly average, or a search term rising for several days, and fills a fixed sentence template with the result. The templates are written in advance; the numbers come from the source. A detector fires only when its statistic crosses its threshold, so most days produce few signals or none.
The national mood index is experimental: an average of three standardized measures (news tone, consumer sentiment, and inverted market volatility), each compared with its own recent baseline.
The disruption scale is experimental. Each source above is compared with its own long-run baseline, built from years of search, pageview, price, hazard and recall history. The components are blended, with the loudest weighted highest, and the day is ranked against every day recorded since 8 July 2026. The dashboard shows the resulting level: Normal, Watch, Elevated, High or Extreme.
Two cards under the split screen count the words in its own headlines. Source: the headlines each outlet publishes in its own politics feed: Fox News, The Daily Wire and Breitbart on the right; MS NOW, Mother Jones and Daily Kos on the left; PBS NewsHour, NPR and The Hill in the center, since 11 September 2026. The top five from each outlet are read every six hours and kept since 8 July 2026, titles only. The cards show names, counts and shares; they never show the headlines themselves.
Split screen agenda lists, for each week and each side, the three names that side's headlines used most. A name is a run of capitalised words in a headline (a person, a place, an organization, a program), counted once per headline. Labels such as "Watch" or "Exclusive", titles such as "President" or "Sen.", and days of the week are not names. Full names and surnames are counted together, so "Elizabeth Warren" counts as "Warren". Trump, Democrats and Republicans are left out of the ranking because they appear in so many headlines; instead, a line above the table gives the share of the right's headlines that name Democrats and of the left's that name Republicans. A ring marks a name that is also among another side's eight most-used that week.
What the lead slots are about sorts headlines into the 24 topics below. Each topic is a fixed list of whole words or phrases; a headline belongs to a topic when it contains any of them, and it counts in every topic it matches. Each share is a percentage of that side's own headlines, because the right's outlets publish about twice as many as the left's. A topic is shown for a side when it reaches 4% of that side's headlines, and a last bar shows the share that matches none of the 24. Words match exactly as written unless marked "any capitalisation".
Nothing in either card is scored for tone or sentiment, and nothing is summarised: both count the outlets' own words.
No accounts, no analytics and no advertising trackers. Your theme choice and any panels you hide are stored in your own browser. The Look back panel loads Wikipedia rankings from wikimedia.org.
Read, cite, screenshot and link. Attribution to the underlying source, with a link here, is appreciated. Government-sourced data is public domain. Automated bulk collection of this site, and redistribution of its data feeds, are not permitted. For data licensing or press inquiries, use the contact form at clouddots.io.
Us At a Glance is independent and not affiliated with any government agency, Google, Bluesky, the Wikimedia Foundation, the University of Michigan, or CBOE. Provisional data (notably recent mortality and recall counts) is revised by its sources and may change; each panel shows the date its data describes. Nothing here is medical, financial, or legal advice. Corrections are welcome.