A Data Visualization Newsletter

Our newest daily chart looks at the energy sources powering the U.S.’s electricity market. The U.S. has shifted somewhat towards greener energy sources over the last decade; more and more electricity is being generated by natural gas, a cleaner alternative to coal. Still, we found that less than 13% of electricity in 2016 came from renewable energy sources.

Countless global corporations have been accused of tax avoidance: Google, Apple, Amazon, and now, Nike. An analysis of the Panama Papers revealed that the retail giant has been funneling its profits to the Netherlands, allowing them to pay little to no taxes. This visualization from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) allows you to actually follow the intricate path your money takes after you make a purchase from Nike.

Do men and women write about love differently? Turns out the answer is a resounding yes. By combing through four years of essay submissions to the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, The Upshot investigates what words are unique to male and female writers, and how they differ in their portrayals of relationships and romance.

This may be an off-year in the U.S. election cycle, but last Tuesday still featured a few hotly contested races. Many considered the Virginia gubernatorial race, in particular, a bellwether of the political climate. The Democrat Ralph Northam ended up winning, amidst the biggest statewide turnout in two decades. But the bigger story, as the Washington Post highlights, may be how the state’s major regions continued to drift towards the poles of the political spectrum.

Through Q3 2017, 6,752 retail locations were scheduled to close in the United States (excluding grocery stores and restaurants). That’s more than double the 2016 number and close to the record from the 2008 financial crisis. It’s all part of what observers are dubbing the “retail apocalypse”. And with credit markets likely to tighten in the coming years, Bloomberg’s graphics team shows that highly leveraged retailers will continue to feel the pain.

Here’s the newest article from Distill, a scientific publication from Google that aims to advance human understanding of machine learning. The piece examines “feature visualization” within a neural network, a growing area of AI research that looks at how the neurons interpret an image and interact with each other. Needless to say, you might want to brush up on your neural nets before delving into this one.