Derek Thompson for The Atlantic highlights recent research comparing mortality in America against rates in Europe:

According to a new working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Americans now die earlier than their European counterparts, no matter what age you’re looking at. Compared with Europeans, American babies are more likely to die before they turn 5, American teens are more likely to die before they turn 20, and American adults are more likely to die before they turn 65. At every age, living in the United States carries a higher risk of mortality. This is America’s unsung death penalty, and it adds up. Average life expectancy surged above 80 years old in just about every Western European country in the 2010s, including Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, the U.K., Denmark, and Switzerland. In the U.S., by contrast, the average life span has never exceeded 79—and now it’s just taken a historic tumble.

Find the full NBER paper here.

In fall 2020, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg planted a flag for each American who died from Covid-19. There were over a quarter of a million flags at the time. The art installation is back at the National Mall, but this time there are over 660,000 flags. The scale is just…a lot.

With millions of Covid-19 deaths worldwide, and hundreds of thousands in the US, the absolute counts have been a challenge to relate to for a while. The Washington Post leaned into rates to communicate scale at the individual level. 1 in 500 Americans died from Covid-19 so far.

Nightingale has a kid’s section with printable visualization activities. Get the kids started early while they absorb information like a sponge.

The only limit is your imagination.

When I’m feeling confused about what’s going on around me, I gravitate towards making charts, so Michelle Rial’s book of charts, Maybe This Will Help: How to Feel Better When Things Stay the Same, resonates. It’s available for pre-order.

From David McCandless and team, who you might know from such books as Information is Beautiful and Knowledge is Beautiful has a new book on Beautiful News:

Inspired by our ongoing Beautiful News project, the book surfaces and visualises the amazing, beautiful, positive things *still* happening in the world. Things we can’t always see because we’re fixated on the negativity of the news.

As per our previous books, this one is a welter of beautiful facts & rigorous data, visualised in riotously colourful visualisations, charts & concept maps.

The subject matter free-ranges across many topic areas. But with one thing in common: it’s all good.

It’s available for pre-order, available in the UK at the end of this month and in the US in January 2022.

Rachael Dottle, Laura Bliss and Pablo Robles for Bloomberg on how urban highways often split communities:

By the 1960s, the neighborhood’s business core was gone, replaced by newly constructed Interstate 94. Homes that had been a short walk to the shops now overlooked a six-lane highway shuttling commuters between the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Homes and businesses were seized and destroyed under eminent domain. The neighborhood was split in two.

The CDC released a chart that shows case, hospitalization, and death rates for fully vaccinated (blue) against not fully vaccinated (black). As you might expect, the rates for the fully vaccinated are much lower, especially for hospitalizations and deaths.

The San Francisco Chronicle compares demographics in your neighborhood in 2020 against 2010. It’s a straightforward app that lets you enter an address (not just in California) and it shows you the changes at several geographic levels.

I like how snappy it is when you enter an address.

Kim Moran-Jones quilted temperature minima and maxima in the UK, along with Covid-19 deaths on the perimeter in grayscale. Data and the physical fit well together.

If I had to pick just one.

James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti teamed up for another book of maps, Atlas of the Invisible:

Sometimes we miss what we can’t step back to see. Sometimes the invisible only appears with the creep of time. And sometimes, in the case of historical events, the visible becomes invisible with the loss of a generation. Graphics give us the power to zoom out, to compare, to remember.

This is their third book together, the first two being London: The Information Capital and Where the Animals Go. Atlas of the Invisible is available in the UK and available for pre-order in the US. It looks promising.

Anna Flagg, for NYT’s The Upshot, used dots arranged as a stacked area chart to show the difference between two mortality rates. Each dot represents 10 people, and they start as a random cloud. A transition to show rate by age lends focus to both an absolute and relative count.

You might have heard that Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. More than some countries. You might have wondered how that could be possible. The New York Times explains with a set of graphics and illustrations.

Bar charts are the simple answer. Maybe you’re not looking for simple though.