A Data Visualization Newsletter

Giorgia Lupi has been at the forefront of information design for more than a decade. But over the last several years, she’s been dealing with a chronic issue: long Covid. In this piece for The New York Times, she presents a visual depiction of her battle, which has involved debilitating symptoms, over 200 doctor’s appointments, and still no end in sight.

‘Tis the season for decoration disasters. Each year, roughly 18,000 Americans find their way into an emergency room because of Christmas decoration-related injuries. The weekends after Thanksgiving reign as the peak period for these festive fumbles, but they spike again as people take down their decorations around New Year’s. Among the merry and bandaged, toddlers and middle-aged adults tend to be particularly accident prone.

For the last three decades, our deepest secrets — from state affairs, to medical records, to family text chains — have been guarded by a form of digital encryption known as RSA. Up until recently, no computer was powerful enough to crack it. But now, the U.S. and China are locked in a race to build a “quantum computer” capable of harnessing subatomic particles to speed up its processing. The winner could become the arbiter of a new age for science and computing.

If you’re one of the roughly 22 million Americans who buys a real Christmas tree, chances are you have a Fraser, Douglas, or Noble fir in your home standing roughly six to eight feet tall. But Christmas trees come in other shapes and sizes, as evidenced by this list from The Washington Post. Take a virtual stroll past nine of the most unique trees from across the country.

The average one-way commute among Americans took 26.4 minutes in 2022, a slight uptick from last year. But compared to 2019, commute times across almost all major U.S. cities have actually dropped. The New York Times examines why that is — and why it's complicating things for workers who take public transportation.