Challenge your geographical assumptions
Plus: Dark skies, abortion access, and the ill-fated Titan sub
Hello! Welcome to another irregularly scheduled Fair Warning. This week I mostly felt in awe of Titanic director and all-round renaissance man James Cameron (I couldn’t decide what to link to so I chose ‘invented new form of archery for the worst film I’ve ever seen’), was glued to my screen reading about the Wagner Group, and am kind of obsessed with the fact that Outback Steakhouse is really popular in Brazil.
On the home front
This is a nice quick take on light pollution and how hard/far it is for some Americans to access dark skies.
The Places Most Affected by Remote Workers’ Moves Around the Country
The pandemic really upended remote working migration. This is interesting on the link between income, remote working, and people moving around the country. Frankly, why live in New York paying through the nose for rent if you can move to Austin and actually have money?
How access to abortion has changed
A year ago yesterday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Stat from this piece: “With Roe in place, around 18,000 women lived in counties that were more than 300 miles away from the nearest abortion clinic, according to the U.S. Census. When Roe v. Wade was overturned and states banned abortions, that number jumped almost 900 times to 16 million.”
Elsewhere…
North Korea spent the pandemic building a huge border wall
Fascinating look at satellite imagery showing where security has been beefed up along North Korea’s border.
For family and country: why China needs more babies
I like this presentation—horizontal scrolling, and vertical scrolling at different points to keep you on your toes and wondering what will come next.
Is the weather still normal near you?
Berliner-Morgenpost looks at temperature, rain, sun and hot days across Germany to show how the weather has changed—or not, as could be the case.
Can the World Make an Electric Car Battery Without China?
An interesting visual look at how China controls each step of lithium-ion battery production from mining to making electric vehicles.
Odds and ends
The fraught journey to reach the Titanic
I was really hoping someone would take inspiration from Neal Agarwal’s Deep Sea scroller (it has featured in Fair Warning at least once before) and do something about the Titan sub—this definitely fits the bill! I think that the ocean is so huge, so deep that it’s really hard for people to get to grips with and so presenting it in these kinds of ways makes it so much clearer just how vast it is.
I quite like the way this is presented, which feels unusual (radar map of qualities about the city) but I can’t help but notice that all of the top ones score extremely low for affordability…
Reject Your Mental Map Oversimplifications
Most Canadians live south of Seattle. New York is to the West of Santiago in Chile. And other weird Mental Map Oversimplifications that we all make…
That’s everything I have for you this week! Thank you for reading, I hope it was interesting or entertaining or you learned something new. Feel free to get in touch with me by hitting the reply button (that I assume is in your inbox, because I don’t have one for you here).