Sometimes data, like life, comes at you pretty fast. So it was when America’s Department of Justice released over 3m documents related to its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Almost half were scanned images of print-outs of emails. Although these were legible to humans, they needed to be converted back into a digital format before we could analyse them en masse. Fortunately, the team behind Jmail had already completed much of this tedious task and were willing to share their data with us, allowing us to get on with investigating Epstein’s network. This was a stroke of luck.

Occasionally you make your own luck. Our partnership with YouGov allows us to submit specific questions to their weekly survey of Americans’ opinions, but we recognised the appeal of a long-run presidential-approval series when planning our Trump tracker. Our latest polling was conducted after Donald Trump’s administration had launched an aerial assault, with Israel, on Iran. Early surveys suggest the war is unpopular.