The road less travelled
Plus: Van Gogh, AI writing, and the Trump Risk Index
Hello and happy Sunday!
Hopefully you’re relaxing today ready for the week ahead. Me—I’ve been pretty busy this week preparing for my upcoming trip to NY, and trying to make the most of my free time by walking/hiking in north London (and buying the kit for it!)
Over the pond
Of course the LA Times is going to be tracking wildfires in California—this is the perfect example of knowing AND serving your audience really well. The depth of information is really good too.
What to expect in the sprint to Election Day – and beyond
This is a nice timeline presented similarly to those board games I played as a kid, kinda snakes and ladders meets political calendar. Anyway, it’s very useful if you’re wondering what’s happening next, and thank goodness the election seems to have gotten more interesting for us bystanders…
A part of me was like, “this sounds great” (can you tell I am struggling with being around people 24/7?) but then I realised that it’s maybe not great? Maybe it’s a bit scary or eerie? (I also like eerie things, but even I have my limits) I dunno but I kind of want to drive down these now just to test it. “Excuse me, I was told I would see NOBODY on this route.”
How Does Your State Make Electricity?
This is a really interesting rundown of how each state is generating electricity. On the whole, America has switched from coal to gas, but each state has wildly different energy sources for electricity.
Male/Female Ratio by US County (Reddit)
I didn’t think this would be as interesting as it is. What is going on in Nevada!? It has given me an idea, though…
Elsewhere…
“The Israel-Hamas war has triggered new cycles of violence beyond the borders of Gaza, drawing global attention to the network of Iranian-backed militias that wield influence — and arms — across the Middle East.” This is a really detailed graphically-rich explanation of exactly what has happened. What an interesting way to look at such a big, and ongoing (thereby harder to cover) news topic.
Which countries would be most affected by a second Trump term?
The Economist says this is the “Trump risk index”.
Odds and ends
I really love this visual presentation. I find Tableau can sometimes be a bit quirky, but I also know there’s a whole community of people using it to make really great things. This is one of them. So what do I like about it? Firstly, the data, which comes from vangoghletters.org (I didn’t manage to find an easy way to grab all the data but I didn’t look that hard, sorry!) Then, I just love that Annabelle turned his own artwork into information about his own life and writings. It’s perhaps a bit shallow in terms of helping people understand the data, but I am obsessed with this visual approach.
Can an AI make a data-driven, visual story?
What I like about this is that not only does The Pudding show you the output from using AI, they also go through every single step and show you how they got there. So you could probably go through this and do something similar by yourself, which is cool.
It seems like everyone is creating their own indexes right now. This is Axios’ answer to The Economist’s Big Mac Index. I just really love that it seems quite random, and also the data/visual encoding is crystal clear: I can see exactly how many dumplings I can buy in each city.
‘Weird and Daunting’: 7,000 Readers Told Us How It Felt to Focus
I enjoyed this little experiment from the NYT: They asked readers to look at a painting for 10 minutes (here, if you’d like to try it), tracked how long they spent on the page, and asked readers about their experience.
The findings are really fascinating to me because I think it’s so alien for us to just sit and focus on one thing for even such a short space of time. It tells me we need to be better at rest—something I’ve been keenly aware of in myself. I’m bad at slowing down. I’m bad at being in the moment, and I always want to move to the next thing. I’m trying to change it, which is why I’ve started hiking. It forces me to slow down mentally, to exist in the now. Each breath a reminder to remain absorbed in a simple task—one foot in front the other.
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.