Vasant Laplam in March 2023
Hello there!
I’m an independent data journalist. You can find me posting charts on LinkedIn and TikTok.
In the summer of 2024, I legally changed my name to Vasant Alex Laplam. My previous work was written under the name James Pothen.
I never expected to be a reporter. First, I made my Indian immigrant parents happy and earned a civil engineering degree from Cornell University. When that didn’t work I became a programmer for The New York Times.
Four years in, my lucky break came in the form of an obituary for Julia Sand in The Times’s acclaimed Overlooked series. After that, I decided to change careers and earned a journalism degree at New York University. I most recently worked at a trade publication covering digital payments.
I belong to many different tribes: Indian-American, Malayali, Marathi, Millennial, Virginian, New Yorker, Depressive, Homeschool Survivor and Exvangelical Christian.