A Data Visualization Newsletter

On Thursday, President Biden signed a bill from Congress that officially made Juneteenth a national holiday in the United States. But where does Juneteenth stem from? It dates back to June 19, 1865, when Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas that the more than 250,000 enslaved people in the state were free. Since then, Juneteenth has morphed into a day of jubilation, marking the end of war fought to preserve slavery.

Since last year’s presidential election, state lawmakers have introduced over 1,000 bills aimed at changing voting regulations. Most news coverage has focused on the 300+ bills championed by Republicans which would create new voting restrictions and scale back mail-in voting. But the majority of recent bills have actually been intended to expand voting access. Bloomberg reviews these bills and the ones that have already been signed into law.

Medical debt accounts for 58% of all debt collections in the U.S. and has forced hundreds of thousands of Americans into bankruptcy. And some of the largest hospitals in the country are contributing to the problem; an analysis by Johns Hopkins shows that many of the top 100 hospitals use predatory tactics to pursue patients for unpaid bills. See which hospitals are most at fault in this story from Axios.

Wildfires burned hundreds of thousands of acres in the American west last year, a symptom of a decades-long drought in the region. Conditions are even worse in 2021, making scientists wonder: just how bad is this drought? An analysis of tree rings by Park Williams and his team suggests that this drought is now on par with a megadrought from the 1500s.