Drew Harwell, for The Washington Post, reporting on a growing database and who has access to the records:

The rapid expansion of the database and the ability of 2,700 CBP officers to access it without a warrant — two details not previously known about the database — have raised alarms in Congress about what use the government has made of the information, much of which is captured from people not suspected of any crime. CBP officials told congressional staff the data is maintained for 15 years.

Details of the database were revealed Thursday in a letter to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who criticized the agency for “allowing indiscriminate rifling through Americans’ private records” and called for stronger privacy protections.

Aaron Reiss and Oscar Molina Palestina, for The Pudding, explore the sounds of Mexico City, focusing on the street vendors and daily life. With implementation by Michelle McGhee and illustrations by Diego Parés, the piece walks you through individual sounds with what they mean and why they are relevant.

The sounds on their own probably would’ve just seemed like noise to a foreigner, but the tour through the illustrated city really helps you hear.

Annie Fu, Walt Hickey, and Shayanne Gal, for Insider, show the disproportionately aging government officials with a series of straightforward charts with lines moving up. You expect age across most occupations to increase with life expectancy, but this seems a bit much.

See also the aging distribution over time.

With the growth in online shopping over the years, companies required more space to store their products, which gave rise to mega warehouses (more than 100k square feet) across the country. Judith Lewis Mernit and Geoff McGhee describe and show the growth with a map.

Sarah Slobin and Joanna Plucinska, for Reuters, report on the challenges of counting and tracking thousands of orphans in Ukraine who were evacuated and relocated when Russia invaded:

When Russia invaded on Feb. 24, there were more than 105,000 children in Ukraine’s network of more than 700 institutions – known as orphanages or ‘internats’ – either full-time or part-time. That’s just over 1% of the child population – the highest rate of institutionalization in Europe, according to data from the European Union and UNICEF.

Around half the children in Ukraine’s orphanages were disabled, according to UNICEF. But Ukraine’s state record-keeping system, known as UIAS “Children,” was not capable of tracking or tracing children sent home from institutions, according to the Support to Ukraine’s Reforms for Governance project (SURGe), a Canadian government-funded agency contracted by the NSS to help support it.

Time spent data munging is time well spent.

Serena Wiliams’ tennis career is impressive for its success and longevity, which are easily seen here. The Athletic compiled a list of the Grand Slam champions that Williams beat between 1991 and 2019, which happens to be everyone.

Sometimes the simplest presentation is best. In this example, the angle they looked at the data makes the graphic.

Changing the fonts you use for labels and annotation is one of the easiest ways to make charts more readable and less messy, which makes a chart more inviting to examine. For Datawrapper, Lisa Charlotte Muth discusses font choices and what to look for.

Can’t go wrong with another one of Muth’s clear and practical guides.

Measuring the condition of the economy is tricky, because there are many parts to the economy. You can’t just say it’s good or bad. So Ben Casselman and Lauren Leatherby, for The New York Times, broke it down with a series of charts to view from different angles.

Krisztina Szűcs likes to make animated charts to show sports results, from fencing, handball, soccer, to hockey. She cataloged all of her sports charts in one place. I’m partial to the triangle timelines, which play well to sports with back and forth scores.

Dries Depoorter recorded video from open cameras for a week and scraped Instagram photos. Then he used AI to identify the people in the photos and their locations. Depoorter calls it The Follower.

Reuters reported on the fires in the Arctic and the relatively high levels of carbon emissions they release in the atmosphere. The map above shows carbon emissions from wildfire in 2021, and the chart on the right shows totals by latitude, which emphasizes the geography in the north.

The illustrations, which I appreciate and have become more of a norm in Reuters pieces, round out the maps and charts with more context:

It’s nice that visualization has developed over the years to the point that there are dedicated classes for it, but I also like learning informally.

People have been having fun with the text-to-image generators lately. Enter a description, and the AI churns out believable and sometimes detailed images that match the input. The reason these systems work is because the models were trained on a lot of data, in the form of images. Andy Baio and Simon Willison made a tool to browse a subset of this data behind the recently released Stable Diffusion.

In the never-ending quest to find the perfect color scheme for any given situation at any given moment, Coolors is another set of tools to find the right shades for your application. The twist is that there’s a generator that shows you schemes based on inputs, such as a certain hue or a photograph. There is also a list of trending palettes.

To serve the ball in tennis, a player first tosses the ball in the air. The New York Times explained the details behind the simple action, from mechanics, positioning, to point of contact. They got fancy with it.

Harry Stevens, for The Washington Post, how simulations can be used to detect severely gerrymandered congressional districts. In the interactive, you play the role of concerned citizen with the task of proposing a map that more closely resembles the political leanings of the state as a whole.

Know Your Meme analyzed a decade of meme data to see where the memes have come from, breaking it down by year. It’s all Twitter and TikTok these days, but it used to be YouTube and 4chan.

Time for less work and more play.