Writing & Investigations

Cryptographic Amnesia

Code, Power, and the Algorithmic Mediation of Everyday Life

Cryptographic Amnesia is a cultural history of how codes and ciphers moved from the margins of everyday life to its infrastructure. Rather than treating cryptography as a sequence of technical breakthroughs or instruments of war, the book follows its civilian uses and meanings across the twentieth century: as a way to protect secrets, verify identity, conduct commerce, resist surveillance, and organize political life. Based on archival research, long-form interviews, and public records, it asks how a technical practice came to carry such broad claims about freedom, trust, and power. The result is a people's history of cryptography and a newly usable past for anyone who relies on encryption today.

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How Much Is a Verification Worth?

What is a single identity verification actually worth? A dollar figure, built up from Enigma's data.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

How to Sue a Company That Doesn't Even Exist

Surfaced 8,747 federal mass-defendant cases from the RECAP archive to show how mass-litigation targets businesses that don't really exist.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Anatomy of a Shell Company

What a shell company actually looks like, and how shared addresses, agents, and officers expose the networks behind them.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Can Business Data Predict March Madness?

A cheeky twist on the 'bracketology' of sports prediction.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Wyoming's Corporate Boom

The state structures that make anonymous business ownership a paid feature.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

No Branches, No Verification, No Problem

How a Colorado licensing carve-out concentrated more than half of all crypto-named money-service-business registrants in a single state.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

The Drug Testing Lab Industry

Regional variation, correlations, and fragmentation across the drug-testing lab industry.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

When Compliance Is Skin Deep

How med spas use their business structure and registration to work around medical-practice rules.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Filed Under Fiction

The implausible, unvalidated officer names that slip into official state business registrations.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Lifecycles of Vice Merchants

How long businesses in the vice trades survive, compared across several categories.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

The Geography of Corporate America

A jurisdictional map of where corporate America incorporates, and why.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Slice Slice Baby

What a viral pizza review is actually worth, traced through review scores, revenue, foot traffic, and geography.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

The Michelin Effect

Revenue, geography, and star status, compared across more than 1,700 restaurants.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Spirits of Retail Past

How seasonal Halloween stores occupy and reuse the empty shells of former retail space.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

OpenRoundup: Multi-Table Data Wrangling Through Interactive Visualization

An interactive take on multi-table data wrangling that continues the work begun in Table Scraps.

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Lead author: Stephen Kasica. Charles co-authored as academic advisor on the doctoral research; these are not sole or primary publications of his.

Iceberg Sensemaking: A Process Model for Critical Data Analysis and Visualization

A process model for the hidden, below-the-waterline work of critical data analysis, reframed through an interpretivist lens.

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With Tamara Munzner. Related newsroom data papers led by Stephen Kasica are listed separately under advisor co-authorship.

The Lifespan of Ephemera: Reflections on Collaborative Art and the Embodiment of Data

A look back at Knowing Together, and what a digital model can and cannot preserve of an embodied, collaborative experience.

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Dirty Data in the Newsroom: Comparing Data Preparation in Journalism and Data Science

An ethnography of how journalists and data scientists actually clean data.

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Lead author: Stephen Kasica. Charles co-authored as academic advisor on the doctoral research; these are not sole or primary publications of his.

Table Scraps: An Actionable Framework for Multi-Table Data Wrangling from an Artifact Study of Computational Journalism

A framework for wrangling data spread across many tables, built from an artifact study of computational-journalism notebooks and pipelines.

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Lead author: Stephen Kasica. Charles co-authored as academic advisor on the doctoral research; these are not sole or primary publications of his.

Knowing Together: An Experiment in Collaborative Photogrammetry

A collaborative photogrammetry experiment that preserved distortion as evidence of the people and process behind a 3D image.

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Walter Benjamin and the Question of Print in Media History

Reads Benjamin’s theory of print as a media history problem: how a technology of reproduction reshapes what counts as culture.

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A Brief Introduction to Impact: 'The Meme Font'

A cultural history of Impact, the typeface that became the definitive look of the image macro and the internet meme.

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Web Almanac: Fonts (2025)

How the web actually uses type, measured across millions of sites: what fonts get loaded, in what formats, and at what cost to the page.

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Web Almanac: Fonts (2024)

Web typography at global scale, from font formats and delivery to variable fonts, icons, and how type actually renders.

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Guide to SecureDrop: An Emerging Platform for Secure and Anonymous Communication in Newsrooms

The first published study of how newsrooms adopted SecureDrop for secure communication with anonymous sources.

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Teaching Data and Computational Journalism

A national study of data-journalism teaching at 113 programs, with practical models for developing computational curricula.

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Sensors and Sensibilia: A Historical Survey

A history of sensing technology, and how measurement devices changed what a journalist can observe in the first place.

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Choosing Web Fonts: A Beginner's Guide

A beginner's guide that chooses a web font the right way round, starting from the content, its readers, the languages it has to cover, and what the browser has to do to render it.

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The New Wave of Indian Type

The designers remaking Indian type for a moment when scripts, technologies, and reading habits are all changing at once.

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Modernizing Arabic Type for a Digital Audience

The design and engineering decisions behind bringing Arabic typography onto digital screens.

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The Android Developer's Guide to Better Typography

A technical guide by Rod Sheeter to using downloadable fonts and making more deliberate typographic choices in Android applications.

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Written by Rod Sheeter. Edited by Charles Berret.

Scripting Cyrillic

The history and contemporary craft of designing type for the Cyrillic script.

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Hot Type, Always Fresh

Foundry practice, display type, and the constant reinvention of typographic form.

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Match Points: A Field Guide to Business Identity

How to read the identity of a business beyond its state filings: address clusters, contact graphs, zombie entities, and sudden proliferation.

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Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Equipment for Living

Teaching photography, photogrammetry, and world-building as ways to think about memory, ritual, collaboration, and the ordinary business of living.

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The Drawbridge Model of Cryptographic Communication

Cryptography as a drawbridge mediating communications: raising and lowering access without tearing the channel down.

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Newsrooms Are Making Leaking Easier, and More Secure, Than Ever

How SecureDrop-era tooling made leaking easier for sources and safer for newsrooms, without trading one for the other.

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A Crucial Skill That Most J-Schools Aren't Teaching

Why journalism schools need computational literacy, not as a specialty, but as a core skill for reporting in a data-shaped world.

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Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting

On Dietmar Elger's biography of the painter Gerhard Richter.

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No Such Thing as Silence

On Kyle Gann's study of John Cage's silent composition 4'33".

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The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography

The doctoral dissertation behind Cryptographic Amnesia, examining how cryptography acquired new cultural and political meanings in twentieth-century America.

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The on-site file contains selected excerpts.