@albertocairo.com
Designer, journalist, and professor. Author of 'The Art of Insight' (2023) 'How Charts Lie' (2019), 'The Truthful Art' (2016), and 'The Functional Art' (2012). NEW PROJECT: https://openvisualizationacademy.org/
These courses start in two weeks.
They're about cultivating a practice of noticing, understanding how observation becomes data, and giving yourself the permission to be creative with the information you make.
They're also about community and environmental care.
Guaranteed to change your 🧠!
This thread is incredible; if you have more suggestions, post them in the replies:
You're correct. I should have written "rarely", as it's not often to face someone as malicious and shamelessly ghoulish as Helen Joyce.
This. Eve Sedgwick ("How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay") wrote about this sort of thing decades ago (w/r/t cis gay kids)! The political class (w/ exceptions) will protect adults who are already ("alas") trans, but they want to minimize the number of trans ppl we get in future. Tolerance ≠ acceptance.
It's obvious, although never explicitly acknowledged and rarely explained in plain, direct language, that in the mind of many politicians and media pundits, the "harm" is not being cisgender.
It's normal to restrict or move away from treatments when evidence of harms starts to outweigh evidence of benefits.
It's not normal to restrict or move away from treatments when there is evidence of benefits and none of harms, even if the evidence of benefits is "low quality."
Substacker Stephan Geering wrote "Challenge for those who are very confident that Claude isn't conscious: Explain how human consciousness works."
I'm sure that I'm not the first to say this, but this hollow question, which is becoming increasingly common among Substack types, is the 'Russell's teapot' of our times.
l keep saying this and AI types just ignore it:
Cognitive neuroscience is a field that exists and has an ongoing body of research. We haven't "solved" consciousness, but we aren't totally in the dark either. Neurons aren't just binary switches, and their networks aren't running programs.
Substacker Stephan Geering wrote "Challenge for those who are very confident that Claude isn't conscious: Explain how human consciousness works."
I'm sure that I'm not the first to say this, but this hollow question, which is becoming increasingly common among Substack types, is the 'Russell's teapot' of our times.
🚨Are you at #NICAR26 today? Don't miss the Data Journalism Podcast live recording at 5pm with @propublica.org plus @kleinmatic.bsky.social, @albertocairo.com and me!
schedules.ire.org/nicar-2026/#...
We have the data. My longest columns have more readers, who read longer, and who share them the most.
Screenshot of Gurman Bhatia's course
In the Open Visualization Academy:
NEW COURSE: The Craft of Building Stories with Data, by @chartwaali.bsky.social: openvisualizationacademy.org/courses/the-...
Newsletter: Open Source Fuels the Future of Visualization (P.4 4) by Melissa Strong: openvisualizationacademy.beehiiv.com/p/how-open-s...
My uncle was an early IT entrepreneur. I remember him telling me in the 1990s that programming was not going to be a career for much longer because of progress in no-code software design tools. Yes, that was 40 years ago.
It feels good not to be alone
Show me better than this. Ann Marie Redfield: General view of the animal kingdom, 1857. More here attilabatorfy.substack.com/p/connections
Yep!
This is a fantastic opportunity to learn how to build stories with data. Plus, the course is, like all courses on the platform, for free. 3:30h worse to spend.
#measure #analytics
Good essay: "The AI hype reminds me of earlier breakthroughs in low and no-code tooling. I don’t doubt that AI can be a useful tool [...] But these arguments always leave me thinking about the accidental and essential complexity again."
Pay close attention to the sections about friction and care:
It's a fantastic course!!!
Screenshot of Gurman Bhatia's course
In the Open Visualization Academy:
NEW COURSE: The Craft of Building Stories with Data, by @chartwaali.bsky.social: openvisualizationacademy.org/courses/the-...
Newsletter: Open Source Fuels the Future of Visualization (P.4 4) by Melissa Strong: openvisualizationacademy.beehiiv.com/p/how-open-s...
Deniz Cem Önduygu’s project tracking the conceptual connections between philosophers he reads is fantastic www.denizcemonduygu.com/philo/
Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co
A reminder that we are adding a new course to the Open Visualization Academy per month. We'll release 'The Craft of Building Stories with Data' by @chartwaali.bsky.social TOMORROW.
(We have 12+ courses at different stages of production!)
#dataViz #dataVisualization #infographics #dataJournalism
Christ ProPublica does good work.
A reminder that we are adding a new course to the Open Visualization Academy per month. We'll release 'The Craft of Building Stories with Data' by @chartwaali.bsky.social TOMORROW.
(We have 12+ courses at different stages of production!)
#dataViz #dataVisualization #infographics #dataJournalism
Among the many problems I have with grifters like Benjamin Ryan or Jesse Singal is that they never explain why must keep questioning trans people about who they are, but we shouldn't do the same with cisgender people. The answer is obvious: In their minds, cis is normal & desirable, and trans isn't.
The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s GOP started a group chat for conservative students — and within 3 weeks, it was filled with over 400 instances of the N-word, Nazi rhetoric and writings of "dozens of ways of violently killing Black people"
Moreover, it takes some serious cluelessness to say that *at Yale*
Reading that Buckley was a “philosopher” or that he was part of a tradition of “moderate” U.S. conservatism made me chuckle.
This is a great find!
1828-- Not long after Dupin published his first b/w choropleth (1826)
The use of color is subtle; uses what looks like a nice color ramp, but actually colored patterns. Great detail shown
I never heard of the cartographer -- F. von Doring