New to me, Tom Gauld, for New Scientist, made a fine pie chart to show what the Mars rover can see while on the surface of the Red Planet.

This is up there with the pie chart pyramid and eaten pie.

Thin Air, Real Money is a game to help you understand the cryptocurrency schemes from Trump. Experience the millions in gains as the president or the losses as not the president.

The title is based on Trump’s tweet from 2019:

I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity….

That opinion has since switched.

Celebrating 30 seasons of the WNBA, ESPN has a fun piece on the history of the league and how it has grown. I like the tour of the illustration as the charts go by.

Here’s what happened in September.

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, the Washington Post called out the fifty biggest donors in 2026 and categorized them by the parties they donated to. The gray rectangles are donations from organizations, which happen to be related to cryptocurrency, gambling, AI, and guns. Together, this small group of donors have donated $1.7 billion.

A live Caltrans feed of the southbound 101 highway in California is translated to music-ish tones. Each vehicle that passes is a note. Select the instruments you want.

It doesn’t compare to actual composition, but the live aspect is interesting. You might want to view it on a computer that is younger than a decade, as mine buckled under the pressure.

Continuing the four-part series on wealth inequality in America, the most recent video from Politizane explains the point of view from income and spending.
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When you think about how the economy is doing these days, it can seem bad when you know people out of work and wages are not keeping up with inflation. The economy can seem good though when the unemployment rate is relatively low and spending is up. For Reuters, Prinz Magtulis and Ann Saphir use a set of line charts to show two perspectives of the economy.

The icons for happy and sad feel like corporate PowerPoint, but hey, if it works it works.

For 404 Media, Jason Koebler collated the dumb emails they receive from dumb AI agents that are ruining the internet experience.

Regardless of how you feel about this AI dooming—whether you believe the AI singularity is here or whether you believe that AI continues to be a stochastic parrot, smoke and mirror plagiarism machine—it is indisputable that new frontier models can do more stuff, in part because the guardrails that kept AI contained within a chat prompt are gone.

At the moment, it does not matter whether AI is “reasoning,” whether AI constantly gets things wrong, or whether mishaps are entirely the fault of reckless coders and cybersecurity professionals at AI companies: The fact of the matter is that “AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying.

I get a lot of these emails. I assume it’s a volume game like sending a million Nigerian prince emails, but that at least had a payoff for scammers, right? The pretend emails feigning interest in people’s work (or promises of rare datasets in my case) is just volume annoyance.

This week, there were a lot of trade-offs between utility and aesthetics. How do you find the balance?

For the Verge, Lauren Feiner visited Loudoun County, Virginia, which used to be the location of AOL headquarters. After the dot-com bust, the county opened the empty AOL buildings and infrastructure to data centers. The plan worked and was humming along, until the past couple years when hyperscalers suddenly needed a lot more space and resources.

Loudoun County residents are also starting to take notice. Within the past few years, data centers have been elevated from an unremarkable part of daily life in Loudoun to something that many residents now think about every day. For some, it’s the constant hum they hear from their decks; for others, it’s the transmission towers that loom over their favorite green space, or the surprise call from their energy utility that one of those towers could go up in their own backyard. While residents recognize that data centers have brought a lot of prosperity to the county, they’re beginning to wonder how much more they can take.

The residents interviewed in this story seem about as conflicted as the people using generative AI. On the one hand, the technology brings benefits to the community in the form of jobs, reduced property taxes, and increasing home values. On the other hand, some neighbors get a giant tower built in front of their home’s sight line or light shining through their windows all night.

Open Peeps by Pablo Stanley is a library of people illustrations. You can mix and match clothes, faces, hair, and bodies for a wide array of characters.

Summer 2026 is likely the hottest summer on record since 1895. The NYT editorial board describes the warming days and warns of what is to come.

In many parts of the country, extreme heat affects much more of the year than it once did. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fulton County, Ga., which includes Atlanta, spent about 47 days a year with a heat index (a measure that combines temperature and humidity to estimate how hot it feels) exceeding 90 degrees. In recent years, Fulton County’s residents have typically endured 79 such days, an increase of a month.

There are several charts and maps by graphics editor Gus Wezerek. The introduction chart, shown above, looks like radiant lines rising off a hot surface.

It’s a clever use of a connected scatterplot. The x-axis is the average days per year with a heat index above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, using a 10-year moving average. The y-axis is the difference between points in time. Points are connected from 1995 through 2025.

The Colorado River is at risk due to drought and states using more than the river provides. For Reuters, Travis Hartman and Andrew Hay mapped and charted how volumes have changed over time.

Water use peaked in the late 20th century. Consumption has eased since, but the U.S. still draws more from the Colorado than the river provides — a gap widened over the past two decades by a megadrought that has pulled reservoir levels sharply lower.

This is a very flow-centric piece. It starts with a moving water line, which ends up being the top of a Sankey diagram. The bar chart uses the same water pattern that moves a little bit at the top. Then there’s a map of the actual river.

The United Nations voted to support the Equal Area map projection, which more accurately shows the size of Africa than the Mercator projection. However, Japan has requested a revision, because the Kuril Islands is shown to belong to Russia. For the Guardian, Agence France-Presse reports:

Japanese government spokesperson Minoru Kihara on Thursday said the new map – known as the Equal Earth cartographic projection – “contained a depiction contradicting the Japanese government’s position”.

“We lodged a protest with the map site’s operator through our diplomatic channel to demand the correction of this depiction,” Kihara told reporters.

He declined to say when the issue was brought to government’s attention but said Japan “needs to prevent misconceptions of our territories and geographical names from spreading”.

The disputed islands were seized in 1945 by the former Soviet Union, which then expelled the Japanese population.

There are those trade-offs again when abstracting reality.

9/11 in Realtime, developed by Robbie Byrd, replays the news on the day of the attacks through television broadcasts, radio stations, and traffic control.

Students entering high school this fall were born more than a decade after the attacks, and many of their teachers have no first-hand memory of the day. The 9/11 Realtime Archive was built for them: rather than summarizing history, it replays the primary record itself, alongside curriculum guidance for classroom use and clear content advisories.

“I started this project because, as a college student pulling an all-nighter on September 10, 2001, I slept through most of the next morning,” said Robbie Byrd, the independent developer who created the project. “I created this site to help others who didn’t–or couldn’t–experience the day as it happened.”

This was tough to watch and listen to, but it is an extensive and interactive archive that accurately represents what the country was witnessing on September 11.

In 2013, a video on U.S. wealth inequality was posted to YouTube by the user Politizane. (It was one of the best visualization projects for the year.) An updated version for 2026 is now available for your viewing pleasure, with even more inequality and much larger stacks of abstract money allotted to fewer people.
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Riley Walz charted drawing trends on student art portfolio Artsonia.

Kids shape culture, and their drawings show what captures their attention. I scraped over 100 million drawings and paintings from Artsonia, an online student art gallery, to explore almost 20 years of favorite characters, passing obsessions, and everyday life.

Just search for a topic and you can see the trend line for the past couple decades along with charming artwork. I think Baby Yoda’s appeal is just about worn.

This week is about adapting our visualization workflow as the tools change dramatically.

Mathematician Terence Tao, a 2006 Fields Medal winner and professor at UCLA, discusses with Big Think solving problems with AI and the process of finding solutions without. By using AI to effectively skip over the mistakes, challenges, and learning towards a solution, our creative thinking skills could diminish. On the other hand, real progress can be made.

Tao uses the tools for “secondary tasks like doing literature searches or checking a proof or writing some code, proof reading something that I wrote to see if there’s any opportunity to make things a little bit tighter.” This seems to be a common workflow among experts in their respective fields.

I keep thinking back to my graduate school days when I didn’t know what I was doing a lot of the time. The struggle was the most valuable part of the experience. I don’t know if I get as much out it if today’s tools were available then.