A Data Visualization Newsletter

As the longest year on record finally drew to a close last week, The Washington Post’s graphics team set out to recap 2020. From murder hornets, water on the moon, and professional sports bubbles, to our collective binging on blind love stories, Tiger Kings, and dramatic chess matches, this article covers everything that you forgot happened last year.

How bad is your taste in music on Spotify? Tay-tay-fangirl-“cool”-church bad? Stop-getting-all-your-music-from-tiktok bad? Or is it certified-barb-craft-beer-snob bad? The folks at The Pudding built this ruthless A.I. bot to find out, and see how your tastes stack up against millions of objectively good music indicators.

As the coronavirus spread across the globe, it mutated into a variety of strains containing slight differences in genetic material. The original “L” strain, which was detected in Wuhan back in December 2019, has almost completely disappeared at this point; other strains, like the new GV strain sweeping across Europe, have replaced it. While the mutations have not yet resulted in strains that would likely be resistant to a vaccine, it’s important to remain vigilant.

With the vaccine rollout now well underway, three vaccines have established themselves as the most effective solutions. These frontrunners, created by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, were not created equally, however, and have different requirements to be successfully distributed across the globe. This piece from Reuters highlights the important distinctions between the three vaccines, and the complications they may face.