As Kim Nguyen gathered data on New York Times wedding announcements, she came across Todd Schneider’s analysis of them.
Kim Hoang Nguyen was intrigued when she stumbled across Todd William Schneider online. Not because Mr. Schneider, a Yale graduate, screamed marriage material, but rather because of the comprehensive data he collected on a subject she was interested in (according to which, Ivy League graduates were once heavily featured).
“I love your work,” Ms. Nguyen said in an email, referring to his search engine, weddingcrunchers.com.
She was trying to create a similar one to research wedding trends for a story pitch as a freelance writer, and wondered what compelled his work.
In 2013, Mr. Schneider built the search engine on a lark in two weeks, and scraped data from traditional wedding announcements featured in The New York Times from 1981 to 2020 — when traditional announcements became the more narrative Mini-Vows — and analyzed it in a wry, cynical way on his website. (The site is not affiliated with The Times.)
Among his takeaways: “There used to be more Republicans than Democrats cited; over the years there were fewer mentions of preppy boarding schools; and the words ‘hedge fund’ overtook ‘investment bank.’”
“I tracked words and phrases, college names, company names, ages,” said Mr. Schneider, 41, who graduated summa cum laude from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and electrical engineering. He is a founder and the chief technology officer of Poppy Legal, a legal expense management platform start-up company.
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