The National Park Service and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes data on national parks annually, but it’s not always straightforward to access. Kyle Frost brought the data into one place so that it’s easier to view and download.

Decades of national park visitation and outdoor recreation economic data are buried in government spreadsheets. I built this to make it actually usable, whether you work in outdoor rec or just want to know how many people went to Yellowstone last year.

It looks like Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park, by a lot.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was published 30 years ago. To commemorate, Christian Swinehart made Infinite Digest, an illustrated companion to the book:

Now, 30 years after its initial publication, I’m revisiting Infinite Jest and exploring those old intuitions about its structure by visualizing them. Part reader’s guide and part analytical tool, this collection of interactive graphics is my attempt to give readers a unifying view of the book’s whirlwind of characters, narratives, and interlinked references.

The work is based on static graphics that Swinehart illustrated in 2021. They explore timelines, the endnotes, and character connections. So far, there is an interactive version for plot lines and footnote distribution. He also made the data available to download.

This week we look for ways to diverge towards the unexpected.

It’s that time of year again when we hear about how the plants are growing across the country. For the Washington Post, Ben Noll, John Muyskens, and Naema Ahmed have the maps for leaves and flowers.

Meteorological spring started March 1. The astronomical season started March 20. But there’s a third option: The season as decreed by the plants. They don’t follow any calendar and instead leaf out when it’s warm enough.

The first emergence of leaves can be estimated by temperatures since the start of the year. A certain amount of warmth needs to accumulate before leaves appear. This warmth is typically measured through a metric called growing degree days.

Alex Preston used AI in a book review for the New York Times and ended up lifting bits of a review from the Guardian. Emma Loffhagen reports for the Guardian:

Language that appears to be lifted from the Guardian review includes descriptions of characters – “lazy Machiavellian Stefano” appears as “lazy, Machiavellian Stefano” in the New York Times version – and the concluding assessment of the novel: the Guardian review states that the book is “most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland”; while the New York Times version says the characters “populate what is ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland.”

I’m pretty sure Preston is going to need a pseudonym soon.

NASA makes a lot of live data available about the Artemis II mission. Chad Ohman brought all the feeds into one place for a mission control-type dashboard, including if the toilet on board is a go. I guess there are other things too, such as location, measurements, and crew schedule.

It appears there is an upcoming film, Pressure, whose meteorologist main character deals with forecasting uncertainty for the weather on D-Day. It’s coming May 2026, and it’s based on a play from 2014.

Despite a prolonged heat wave, Stagg is convinced that the weather conditions will suddenly deteriorate sharply on June 5, the current date of the proposed D-Day, and that the planned invasion should therefore be postponed. Meanwhile, Krick believes forecasts of a calm sunny day on June 5 and believes that the plans should proceed as usual. While attempting to convince Eisenhower that his forecast of the weather conditions is correct, Stagg struggles with his own fear of potentially getting the forecast wrong.

I’m not much into war movies, but the preview shows maps, data collection, and real-world decisions with uncertainty attached and lives at stake. I’m pretty much required to watch this.

Gas prices are high across the U.S., more so in some places than in others. (Hello from California.) The New York Times has an interactive map of the average price by county. It loads initially by state and then you can zoom in for more details.

I think this is a riff on an older NYT map of the same data and structure, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe it was of temperature?

Either way, I’m a fan of maps that show the data directly through text. See also: most popular resident of every city, midterm challengers, the United States of surnames, London surnames, and how online daters describe themselves.

GlobalPetrolPrices tracks prices around the world for 150 countries, in case you’re wondering how your country compares. If you want to make it feel like you’re getting a bargain, try comparing against Hong Kong prices.

The first downlinked images were published by NASA. The best view of Earth’s night side.
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After demolishing the East Wing of the White House and rushing into construction of a ballroom, the administration was finally ordered to stop until the plans go through the necessary reviews. NYT’s the Upshot made notes on the ballroom design, which is more flashy than practical, such as a stairway to nowhere and fake windows.

I like the enhanced byline: “Junho Lee is a trained architect, Larry Buchanan studied fine arts, and Emily Badger has long written about urban planning.” Apparently NYT has been doing this for a few years.

For those who want to share small datasets in a more straightforward way, Ziptable by Evan Peck makes quick work of the task with a single link.

Ziptable lets you share a small CSV or JSON dataset by sending a single link. The person you send it to opens the link and immediately sees the data in their browser, ready to search, inspect, and download again. No attachments, no cloud storage workflow, and no account required.

Load a dataset. Ziptable compresses and encodes the data. You get a link without the data hitting up a server.

This week is about small things adding up to big things.

For the New York Times, Ruth Igielnik and Katherine Chui charted presidential approval ratings against gas prices in the United States. The two metrics used to correlate strongly, but it’s grown more noisy over the past decade. That might change back:

Polarization, he said, plays a large role in that change.

“Presidents have fairly unified support from their own party, and unified opposition from the other party, which means they have a higher floor and a lower ceiling,” he said, referring to approval ratings.

Still, the current gas spike could be different. The quick pace with which prices have jumped may be enough to upend that trend.

Gas prices in the U.S. have increased to over $4 per gallon. Here in California, some gas stations are charging over $7 per gallon. Maybe we’ll find out if there’s a threshold for gas prices that lowers the approval floor.

Artemis II launches today, scheduled for 6:24 pm EDT. Die Zeit mapped the journey to the moon and back (paywalled). Illustrated to scale and focused on the spacecraft while scrolling, it feels like the opening to space documentary. It just needs a soundtrack and an even-keeled astronaut to narrate the wonders of the universe.

Researchers at Stanford University, epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo, estimated the number of people who would die or be disabled if vaccines were no longer available in the United States. They did this for four diseases: polio, measles, rubella, and diphtheria. ProPublica illustrated the scale of these estimates, if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got his way.

Not ideal.

For Bloomberg, Loren Grush, Sana Pashankar, and Stephanie Davidson describe the Artemis II plan for the evening of April 1.

The mission is a critical milestone in NASA’s ambitious Artemis campaign, aimed at landing humans on the moon once again. In Greek mythology, the goddess Artemis is the twin of Apollo – a nod to the predecessor program that put US astronauts on the lunar surface. This time, however, NASA hopes to establish a base there, where humans can live and work.

The rocket was illustrated with Blender and flight paths are shown with Three.js. I always appreciate a bit of 3-D flourish in space-related illustrations.

Four astronauts are rocketing to the moon on April 1. They’ll spend 10 days orbiting Earth a few times, head out to the moon, circle around, and then come back. Marco Hernandez and Kenneth Chang, for the New York Times, have the illustrations showing the rocket specifications, flight path, and the crew module with the space of two whole minivans.

A so-called shadow fleet of tankers transport oil illicitly around the world. They had been on the decline, but the conflict in Iran has changed things. Financial Times mapped the paths and tactics used by these old ships to avoid detection.

These views from above make me think it won’t be long until ship tracking and detection systems are all just based on satellite images. That’s gotta be a thing by now.

The world’s reliance on gas and oil means the war in Iran affects people everywhere, and you can feel it in the everyday. Pablo Robles and Agnes Chang, for the New York Times, point out the many facets of life that had to adjust.

The small animated illustrations make this piece. They show a bit of what everyone is experiencing these days: pain at the pump and a balloon, a simple joy floating away out of reach.