A Data Visualization Newsletter

Last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released its Annual Homeless Assessment Report. The data from HUD contains a startling trend -- for the first time since the Great Recession, homelessness is on the rise in the United States. We’ve created an infographic to explore the sources of the uptick.

Access to city life varies drastically across the globe. Overall, 80% of the world’s population lives within an hour of a city, but that number is even higher in wealthier countries with better infrastructure. This interactive map lets you explore the inequality in city accessibility. It’s a product of the “Roadless Forest” project, a research effort that combines satellite imagery and crowdsourced data to monitor road building in remote areas of the world.

This visualization, produced in 2013 by the creative agency dumpark, is still as relevant today as ever. Using data from a study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, the viz maps the dispersion and accumulation of plastic debris in the world’s major bodies of water. Based on statistical modeling, it also shows which countries most likely contributed to each major “gyre.”

Datawrapper’s “Uncharted” blog has been publishing great data viz for the last few months, and their most recent post is no different. According to data collected by the UN, over half of the US population under the age of 25 was married in 1971. By 2016, that number had dropped to roughly one in ten. When it comes to taking vows, 30 is the new 20.

After decades of skirting the issue, the U.S. Supreme Court is slated to hear two cases this term about the legality of partisan gerrymandering. In the meantime, a battle over gerrymandering is playing out in Pennsylvania’s state courts. In this piece for The Upshot, Quoctrung Bui and Nate Cohn consider how the current Pennsylvania congressional map could either be made nonpartisan or gerrymandered even more heavily in the Republicans favor.