2026-04-18 07:02:03
The Strait of Hormuz might be “completely open” for ships to pass through, depending on the source and the timing. Hard to say from anecdotes. But at least we can see what’s been going on through data. For the New York Times, Josh Holder, Adina Renner, and Blacki Migliozzi mapped routes before the war started and after and charted events over the past month.
Tags: Iran, New York Times, ships, Strait of Hormuz
2026-04-18 01:30:30
Japanese officials and researchers have been carefully documenting when cherry blossoms bloom in Kyoto for the past 1,200 years. Yasuyuki Aono was the current record keeper, but he passed away recently with no one to take his place. For the Guardian, Chris Baraniuk reports on the search for a new keeper:
“You can very much see that he planned to continue,” said Tuna Acisu, a data scientist at Our World in Data, an online platform that publishes a chart based on Aono’s cherry tree data. “That made me a little bit emotional.”
Now, following a search launched by Acisu last week – sparked by fears that no one would be able to continue the 1,200-year cherry blossom record – a researcher in Japan has stepped forward and offered to make formal observations of the mountain cherry’s spring flowerings.
“He is consulting the same sources as Prof Aono to get us this year’s cherry blossom peak bloom and said he will confirm the date in the coming days,” Acisu said. The researcher in question asked to remain anonymous until the arrangement is finalised.
The data has become a marker for climate change, as the blooms come earlier and earlier. It’s good to see the centuries-old dataset continue.
Tags: cherry blossom, climate, Yasuyuki Aono
2026-04-17 16:18:28
Millions of people protested in Hong Kong against China’s Communist Party back in 2019. China imposed a national security law soon after. Reuters highlights the arrests of several hundred people and how their lives are several years later.
Chan Kim Kam, 38, was one of the first people arrested in Hong Kong under the revamped sedition law, part of a second package of national security laws enacted in 2024 known as Article 23 . She and several others were accused of publishing posts with “seditious intent” related to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
Although she hasn’t been charged, Chan, in an interview with Reuters, said she has lost several jobs due to the fallout of her arrest and now has to report to a police station weekly. “Is it really necessary to kill off a person’s survival space in Hong Kong?” she asked rhetorically. “It’s a kind of suppression targeting people with certain political backgrounds.”
A set of illustrated Post-it notes shows each person arrested, and the theme is constant throughout the article. Colors indicate the type of law invoked to warrant an arrest.
The transitions between anecdote and chart type is very good here and links reality to the statistically abstract.
2026-04-17 04:29:57
Some occupations have more turnover than others. See how it varies for your occupation and others.
2026-04-17 00:39:22
To make India’s census documents more accessible to the public in the 1970s, the government worked on the Portrait of Population for the 1971 Census. Aman Bhargava and Vivek Matthew, for Diagram Chasing, explain the history of the publication and provide an archive of 700 hand-drawn charts from the publication.
Half a century later, what makes these documents worth looking at is the tremendous and earnest effort being made to render this data interesting and engaging. This was before data visualization became cheaper to produce digitally, which means every chart, every pictogram, and every illustrated comparison was an expensive decision in terms of time and effort, especially within the already stretched departments of the government. One can imagine the writers, artists, and designers (because that is what they were, even if the bureaucracy had not used those words) who produced these documents thinking about what would land with a reader holding this pamphlet.
Bring back efforts like this for all countries.
Tags: census, Diagram Chasing, illustration, India, population
2026-04-16 20:05:54
Hi everyone. This is issue No. 384 of the Process, where we aim for data graphics that provide more signal than the defaults. I’m Nathan Yau. This week we put more information in the background to improve the signal in the foreground.
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