A Data Visualization Newsletter

It may seem as though artists like Rihanna, Drake, and Justin Bieber are staples of Spotify playlists nationwide. These beautiful maps from The New York Times, however, tell a different story. Drawing on YouTube data, Josh Katz shows us that, even among “mainstream” musical artists, there are still regional discrepancies to their popularity. Rap acts tend to draw fans from the South, while rock and pop fans congregate farther west.

In late 2016, Google launched “A.I. Experiments”, a website to showcase fun, interactive applications of its artificial intelligence research. Here’s one of their very first projects, which used machine learning to organize thousands of birds by the similarity of their chirping. In a not too distant future, computers may be able to recognize a species using just a one-second soundbite.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, you’re probably no stranger to late afternoon gridlock. But given geography and roadway connectedness, some U.S. cities are more prone to nightmarish traffic than others. Sahil Chinoy of The Washington Post shows that, at 4pm on Friday, it definitely pays to live in Las Vegas and not Boston.

Here’s an oldie but a goodie from Quartz’s graphics team. Using data from the Union of Concerned Scientists, David Yanofsky and Tim Fernholz plot the relative location of every active satellite as of September 1, 2015. Dig into the visual to see which country launched each satellite and for what purpose.

Income growth for poor and middle class Americans has stagnated over the last few decades. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans continue to see their income rise. That’s the conclusion of a group of French economists who are researching the effects of government redistribution on inequality in the United States. And The New York Times’s David Leonhardt points out that a Republican-led tax reform is unlikely to reverse the trend.