Mullets are back, baby
Plus: Hurricanes, news deserts, and Wes Anderson
Hello! Welcome to this week’s Fair Warning. Thank you to everyone who got in touch last week to welcome me back!
Subscribers who have known me a very, very long time may remember that I started out in photo editing—which in some ways was, I suppose, a prelude to my interest in visuals and graphics. So sometimes I seek out interesting photo essays, and boy are they rare these days. This one, where the artist portrays sleeping children next to their drawings of their nightmares, is quite captivating and delightful.
Talking of delightful, I know Wes Anderson isn’t everyone’s cuppa tea but this week I really loved this Instagram reel You better not be turning your Antarctic fieldwork into a Wes Anderson film. Best viewed on a phone, sound on.
Over the Pond
America’s News Deserts Are Growing
Oof: “Compared to 20 years ago, there are now 3,000 fewer newspaper titles in the U.S. and 43,000 fewer newspaper journalists.” Original Tableau map is here.
The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children
Interesting surveys of American adults who don’t want children. Things that stand out to me: 38% of adults 18-49 said it’s because they are concerned about the state of the world, and 26% said they were concerned about the environment.
Who do you think Harris’s VP pick should be?
The Post asks, who do we think she should pick. To which I answer: mate, I can barely decide what to eat each day let alone decide who should help run the country. Maybe someone who isn’t a raging misogynist? That might be good.
The Olympics
Reuters has a great, beautifully-illustrated guide to each sport in the Olympics. It’s made me want to watch water polo (out of curiosity) and I also realised breakdancing is new for this year’s Olympics. I do wonder how on earth they decide on new events (and which ones to remove!)
The NYT asks us to guess the peak speed of several objects being thrown or hit in a sport that’s taking place at the Olympics. (Think javelin, badminton etc). Turns out I’m not great at guessing the speed of objects—2 golds, 3 silvers, 1 bronze. Can you beat me?
The South China Morning Post looks at the difference a century makes when it comes to the Olympics. I am by no means an Olympics enthusiast but I really enjoyed learning about the differences in key sports, from outfits to technology used.
Odds and ends
The mullet is alive and well in AFL
This is some in-depth analysis of Australian football players’ hairstyles. My favourite sentence in the whole thing: Among those who had played at least three matches, we found players with mullets score, on average per game, slightly fewer points than players without mullets. More news organisations should analyse hairstyles IMHO.
Hurricanes never cross the equator. Here’s why
This explains something I have never wondered about, but I love that I feel like I learned something new! When you think about the whole plughole-direction thing it makes sense, but I’d just never thought about it, y’know?
Really enjoyed this thorough data-focused look at what people are saying about sleep training (on the internet), versus actual clinical studies carried out about sleep training. What a great way to illustrate the gap in societal belief and science.
Wes Anderson
Feeling somewhat inspired by that Instagram reel, I wanted to see if anyone had made anything data-related about Wes Anderson, and… yes. So just for fun, here they are:
Network analysis of Wes Anderson films: the stylesheet on this site appears to be broken so it doesn’t look great BUT it walks you through the process of creating the network graph using dplyr and ggplot2.
Wes Anderson color palette for R: man, I love that someone was like “I know what I’m gonna work on for the next few weeks…” and came up with this.
Wes Anderson films and cast: I think this is the same data as the first link, but this Tableau dashboard has a lot more (nicer/prettier) chart options for displaying the data. Like flowers. Aw.
So now you (theoretically) can build Wes Anderson-themed charts using Wes Anderson-themed colour palettes!
That’s everything I have for this week! Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed Fair Warning, please forward to friends and tell them how great it is. If you REALLY liked it, you can buy me a coffee. And as always, you can get in touch with me on X at @SophWarnes or by replying to this email. You’re also welcome to submit things to me, and while I can’t promise to feature them, I do promise I will take a look.