Thinking about the tiny steps along the way to making a chart, even a relatively straightforward one.

Inflation is high. For NYT’s The Upshot, Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Quoctrung Bui busted out the word cloud to show the price increases people noticed in February. As you might expect, the things that people purchase more often appear higher on the list, because the changes are easier to track.

In an effort to make gender inequalities more obvious, World Bank updated their Gender Data Portal:

The World Bank Group has redesigned its Gender Data Portal with these audiences in mind by offering over 900 gender indicators in different formats, ranging from raw data to appealing visualizations and stories. Making sex-disaggregated data easier to analyze, interpret and visualize will bring into focus gender issues that are frequently invisible, including on topics such as digital development, transport, and water. It will highlight existing gender gaps as well as gaps in the availability of gender data.

When you look inside the cities around the world, you will often find familiarity to where you live. For The Washington Post, Bonnie Berkowitz, Dylan Moriarty and Hannah Dormido look for the familiarity in the attacked cities in Ukraine. With side-by-side comparisons to U.S. cities, Ukraine feels less distant.

See also Scale-a-Tron, which lets you compare the scale of anywhere in the world against anywhere else in the world.

For Our World in Data, Max Roser discusses the risk and possible destruction of nuclear war, along with suggestions on how to reduce that risk:

An escalating conflict between nuclear powers – but also an accident, a hacker, a terrorist, or an irresponsible leader – could lead to the detonation of nuclear weapons.

Those risks only go to zero if all nuclear weapons are removed from the world. I believe this is what humanity should work towards, but it is exceedingly hard to achieve, at least in the short term. It is therefore important to see that there are additional ways that can reduce the chance of the world suffering the horrors of nuclear war.

The prices of everything seem to be rising a lot lately. Why? For Vox, Emily Stewart uses eggs as a case study to explain:

“There are different ways of thinking about the inflation issue, and economists by default tend to think about macroeconomic issues such as inflation in macroeconomic terms,” said Isabella Weber, an economist at UMass Amherst. “In this current situation that we are facing, we basically have very strong micro dynamics, that is dynamics on the level of specific sectors that translate into a more general kind of price pressure.”

Eggs don’t paint the full inflation picture in the US, but they do a part of it — it’s more expensive to feed chickens and move eggs around, so it’s more expensive to produce and move eggs, so it’s more expensive for consumers to buy eggs.

As you would imagine, Ukrainian airspace looks empty right now. Reuters mapped flights before the Russian invasion, the day of, and after the European Union airspace ban. The above shows private, commercial, and cargo flights. In separate maps, Reuters also reported unidentified flights, along with detours, cancelations, and the general disruption of international airspace.

Home prices in the U.S. increased dramatically over the past couple of years. The percentage of home purchases by investors rather than future home owners also increased. For The Washington Post, Kevin Schaul and Jonathan O’Connell examined how much these percentages increased in major metro areas. In some places, over a third of home purchases went to investors.

For The Markup, continuing their reports on data privacy, Alfred Ng and Jon Keegan discuss the non-regulation of the location data industry:

Without government regulation, the current approach from Apple and Google is to play catch-up with data brokers for each new way that location data can be shared, experts said.

For example, while app developers could potentially lie to Apple and Google without any way to audit the companies, they face a bigger risk if they violate laws like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The law, which requires companies to disclose all third parties who could receive a person’s data, could be a stronger check on direct server transfers than app store scrutiny.

Connecting back to the real world is how we fill in the gaps.

The Media Manipulation Casebook summarizes how bad-intentioned people take media from past events, movies, and video games and shove the bits into a different context to fill a different purpose:

Posts with recontextualized media often take advantage of short, less than one-minute video clips that lack much context about where the video originates. One 19-second video clip posted to TikTok on February 24, 2022 depicts two paratroopers mid-flight before switching to a selfie of a man speaking in Russian. The post claimed to show troops descending on Ukraine. One of the posts of this clip received over 1 million interactions on TikTok and was shared across Instagram and Twitter. The short clip was not from 2022, but rather can be traced back to a 2015 Instagram post that had no caption, according to a fact check by Reuters.

It’s easy for anyone to grab a picture or video and claim that it shows something that it doesn’t. This is problematic during times of conflict, when accuracy is especially important. For The Washington Post, Elahe Izadi describes how journalists separate real from fake:

The process begins with geolocation: pinpointing exactly where an image was recorded on a map, which Willis calls the “the bread and butter” of verification. “We’ll never publish a clip in our blog updates or tweets if we haven’t located it,” she said.

For that, forensic journalists dissect scenes pixel-by-pixel, looking for landmarks, silhouettes and other details, and cross-referencing images using free tools such as Google Earth or the Russian equivalent, Yandex, as well as satellite subscription services. They might also compare several videos of the same incident to unlock more clues. Sometimes something as small as a tile pattern on a roof can hint at where something took place.

As a way to explore how people use questions in their writing, a straightforward tool by Clive Thompson lets you see all the questions in a body of text. Just copy and paste and you’re set. The above are the questions from George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”.

Try it out here.

See also Thompson’s related tool that shows only the punctuation.

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RealLifeLore explains the history between the two countries and the multi-faceted motivations behind the invasion. As you might expect, the reasons are complex and full of unknowns.

Correctiv is tracking sanctions against Russian individuals and companies, based on data from OpenSanctions.

If you use color as a visual encoding, you should make sure every one can actually see the differences in your scale. The cols4All package from Martijn Tennekes can help by ranking and categorizing a wide set of color schemes.

Color palettes are well organized and made consistent with each other. Moreover, they are scored on several aspects: color-blind-friendliness, the presence of intense colors (which should be avoided), the overall aesthetic harmony, and how many different hues are used. Finally, for each color palette a color for missing values is assigned, which is especially important for spatial data visualization. Currently we support three types: categorical (qualitative) palettes, sequential palettes, and diverging palettes. In the near future, more palette types will be added, such as cyclic, bivariate, and hierarchical.

Many countries have banned Russian aircraft from entering their airspace. Russian in turn has banned other countries. For Bloomberg, Mira Rojanasakul and Jin Wu mapped current bans and showed how flights have had to reroute.

As we know by now, conservatives in the U.S. are more commonly against getting vaccinated for Covid, but it wasn’t always like that. Vox shows how ideas shifted to get to where we are now.

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The 1990s elementary school aesthetic with markers and overhead projector slides works well here. The choices guide you step-by-step through the data points.