Welcome to the 13th edition of The Crunch!
Josh and I would like to thank everyone who has been reading, forwarding and clicking on things in this newsletter, as well as the people who give us permission to feature their excellent work every fortnight. We now have over 13,000 subscribers, which is far more interest than we expected to have for a pretty nerdy topic!
In this week’s newsletter we’ve got the new moon atlas; an extremely detailed visual feature about the effect of the donkey trade; new polling data showing the state of play in UK politics; increasing attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank; a visual guide to banning single-use plastics in Hong Kong; and … the increasing amount of swearing in Taylor Swift albums (?!).
Oh, and read to the end for a bonus – the most complex chart we’ve seen in a long time.
But first, one big chart on … family violence
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are disproportionately affected by family and domestic violence.
Here, Josh has illustrated the disparity for the latest in our one big chart series.
Five charts from the fortnight
1. How China’s demand for donkey hide is devastating African townships
Demand for e-jiao, a Chinese traditional medicine made from donkey hides, is resulting in the slaughter of millions of donkeys each year. This visual feature from Reuters explains how the trade operates, and how this demand is at odds with the donkey’s traditional role in rural Africa.
2. Settler violence against Palestinians is rising in the West Bank
Figures collated by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs shows that attacks by Israelis who live on Palestinian land have increased considerably. Here, Mona Chalabi has visualised the data, as well as the types of attacks.
3. Labour are ahead in the polls, but have they won hearts and minds?
It’s likely to be an election year in the UK and our colleague Ashley Kirk has taken a detailed look at polling figures for Labour and its leader, Keir Starmer, and how they compare with those in previous years.
4. New high resolution moon atlas just dropped
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has released the highest-resolution geological map of the moon to date, according to Nature. I’m no space geologist, but the maps are still very interesting to look at! The actual 1:2,500,000 scale, 200mb, high-resolution file is here if you’d like to take a look, and is free to use for non-commercial purposes. Personally I’d love for someone to re-map it as an interactive, 3D spherical map in the browser.
5. What is banned in Hong Kong’s war on waste
Hong Kong is introducing strict rules banning certain types of single-use plastics.
We love this visual feature from the team at the South China Morning Post, which involved six members of staff keeping all the plastic from takeaway lunches over a week to illustrate the material to be banned under the new restrictions. It also has a bunch of great charts on the amount of waste produced, the amount that goes to landfill and more.
Spotlight on … coral bleaching
The world is undergoing another mass coral bleaching event due to ocean heating. Here, Jez Roff compares the heat stress for coral locations on the Great Barrier Reef in 2024 with other years in which there were bleaching events
Surveys of the reef have confirmed widespread bleaching, as the maps and photos from recent coverage show
The BBC has visualised the recent, rapid rise in ocean temperatures
Off the Charts
This chart shows the frequency of swear words in Taylor Swift albums in chronological order. Apparently her new album has a lot more swearing?
But then it is also a double album, so it’s possible an analysis which normalises the measurement of swearing to swear words per minute (SWPM) might result in Midnights ranking above The Tortured Poets Department. Possibly one for the next Swiftposium.
Bonus chart!
Our other contender for this week’s Off the Charts were these frankly amazing diagrams comparing exoplanets across multiple dimensions. I do not understand anything of what I am seeing here, but I appreciate these in the same way I appreciate powerpoint slides from the US military.
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