Fair Warning - Celibacy, beards, and anxiety
Hi! Welcome to another edition of Fair Warning. This week I went back to London, had coffee with fellow newsletter legend/arch rival Giuseppe (selfie proof), and discussed data journalism as part of a fab panel for Women in Journalism.
I found this piece about the internet in the good old days genuinely heartwarming, very wholesome and extremely relatable. Personally thanks to the internet, I have - among other friends - an American 'mom' who I've known since I was 15 and adore, but not yet met. In my experience, the internet made the world smaller and more interesting in my teens, and has continued to do so.
On the home front
Y'know Troy's timeline in Community with the pizza? I am Troy, you get the idea.
Mapping Preferences over Brexit in the House of Commons
This is a nice network graph of the MPs voting on the eight (8!) options given to them, for the "indicative votes". Like anything is meaningful at this point.
How did your MP vote in the indicative votes?
Just in case you wanted to know and for some reason until this point did not. But don't worry! There will be another round of indicative votes! Great! More votes! Woo democracy!
Over the pond
People Kill People. But the Bullets Seem to Matter — www.nytimes.com
The gun lobby in the US has been banging on about how guns don't kill people, people kill people... But, as is obvious to anyone with a couple of braincells, it matters what weapon you use and which bullets you use. Weapons have become more powerful over time; new research suggests that if the guns had stayed the same, homicides would have declined even more.
I shouldn't laugh but I absolutely did: The share of Americans not having sex is at a record high, and most of them are young men. There's an interesting Twitter thread where the author goes into more detail, suggesting that low labour participation rates among that group = less likely to have relationships = less sex. And that young men living with parents is somewhat of a barrier to having sex. Can I be blunt? The bar is pretty low: Have men tried being more interesting once in a while?
The Stages of Relationships, Distributed
Fun that this follows the celibacy thing, because it's about how relationship timelines in America, comparing the 1970s to 2010s. Obviously, because I'm incurably cynical, there's a little voice in my head going WHAT ABOUT THE DIVORCES, NATHAN? But I do like this a lot.
Boeing 737 Max: Map of Where Planes Went After Flights Grounded
Well, this is weirdly fascinating to watch. "Just because a plane gets grounded, doesn’t mean it’s stranded."
Odds and ends
Women’s Issues Within Political Party Platforms — pudding.cool
How often do political parties talk about women's issues? This is a good if depressing analysis of when women have been mentioned in speeches. First briefly mentioned in 1872 which is slightly earlier than expected, but the word women is prefaced with "loyal" so 😬yay women 😬.
Are Men With Beards More Desirable?
Look, I have an Important Theory about men with beards, and I am willing to go quite a long way to prove it. My hypothesis is that the addition of a beard almost universally makes a young man dramatically more attractive to literally anybody. A ("scientific") study - "the sexiest men were those sporting heavy stubble, followed by short stubble. Men with full beards and clean-shaven men were rated the lowest" BUT I think this moves slightly away from the actual substance of the beard's existence to beard tidiness. An untidy beard is definitely minus points.
I don't really know what to say about this because it makes my stomach tie itself in knots. But this feels like it could be important.
Exploring Anxiety with Embroidery
As you may know, I am kind of a fan of the point where data and art start to blur, and people make physical objects based on data (I have a David Bowie discography necklace that I made and have an unhealthy attachment to despite it not being particularly interesting to look at) so I liked this idea of exploring anxiety with embroidery. It would have been great to see a more advanced attempt at encoding into an embroidered landscape as opposed to just plotting lines, but, this is nonetheless pretty cool.
Meta-data
Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few — medium.economist.com
It's good to see a publication like The Economist talk openly about reflecting on past work. It's interesting; personally I really like working in the open and being transparent and writing blogs about how I feel or what I learned from things, and yet I always felt like this feels a bit oversharey and weird. In the UK at least, there's always been an uneasy sense that everyone is in competition and so sharing is bad. But this sets a good example for how (writers at) publications can be honest and feel more human/relatable.
A decade of the Datablog: 'There's a human story behind every data point'
I liked The Guardian's datablog a lot. 1) I wrote a couple of things for them a few years ago; 2) When I worked at Ampp3d (the Mirror), I could easily explain to people that we were kind of like the tabloid version of the datablog. And it felt like an important thing in the history of data journalism in the UK. So yeah, I enjoyed this article looking back on it.
I think this is pretty much a tutorial(? I barely understand it myself) of how to make a nice map of Panama in ArcGIS. I've never used ArcGIS, I don't feel a need to install and play around with it, but I enjoyed reading someone else's thoughts about their process for how they did something.
After last week went out I felt a sudden tinge of regret that I hadn't made the effort to headline it, and realised that it looked terrible, so the headline is back. Hooray.
One last thing: these photos of Prince Charles made my day.
Well, that's all you're getting this week. If you're enjoying Fair Warning, please pass it on to friends/lovers/colleagues who will also like it. Consider buying me a coffee (Fair Warning is powered by coffee), or supporting Fair Warning on Patreon if that's more your jam. I tweet unrepentantly @SophieWarnes and I won't be upset if you don't follow me, I promise.