Author: Brendan Barry

  • Brexit One Year On

    I still remember where I was on 23 June 2016 as the Brexit referendum results were coming in—drunk at a karaoke bar (for celebrating the end of a softball season) talking with a guy from Manchester about how the hell Britain could be voting to leave the European Union. Fast forward a year (and a…

  • High-rise Living

    I was reading my print edition of the Economist last night and found this graphic—screenshot from the online version—about the rising importance of skyscrapers in the urban landscape. The article was written after the Grenfell Tower inferno and looks at things that could be done to improve safety in high-rises. Naturally, I was reading this on…

  • The Grenfell Fire

    This weekend, the New York Times published an online piece explaining the spread of the Grenfell Tower fire in London. The story uses small animated graphics and videos to show the origin and progression of the fire from an exploding refrigerator on the fourth floor to its trapping of residents on the 23rd and final…

  • Election Night Maps

    My apologies for the radio silence, everybody. The day job has been super busy the last several weeks. I am hoping to return to the regular schedule next week. In the meantime, enjoy this from xkcd. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • The Insurance Exchanges

    There is a lot to unpack about last Thursday and Sunday. But before we dive into that, a little story from the New York Times that caught my eye from Friday. The map shows the counties in the United States where there is one health insurer and no health insurer. Further on in the piece…

  • US State Maps

    I was up late watching the British general election. So forgive me for phoning this one in. But we have a great piece from xkcd that looks at those choropleth US state maps. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • Where the Polling Stands

    Tomorrow is the big day: the general election in the United Kingdom. If, like me, you have been following the news over the last several weeks, you know it has been punctuated by…gaffes. And what was initially considered a certainty for Prime Minister Theresa May is, well, not so much. This graph of polling data…

  • Rising Rate of US Drug Deaths

    While today’s post is not an uplifting story, I did find it remarkable in its presentation. Nothing too fancy or revolutionary to be certain, but remarkable nonetheless. What was it? This morning when I picked up the Times there was a chart in black and red, above the fold, below the cover photo. The story…

  • Where Trump Has Travelled

    Okay, not entirely. But Bloomberg put together a solid series of graphics tracking not the travels of Donald Trump, but his private aircraft. But that information can serve as a rough proxy for Trump’s travels. But the data is not complete—Russia is missing from the map though he has visited the country for business. Credit for…

  • The United States of Misspelled Werds

    The National Spelling Bee was this week and Google produced a map of the words each state seeks the most help spelling goodly. Naturally, there was a misspelling in their own graphic—unfortunately I do not have an image of that, but trust me they misspelled ninety as nintey in Maryland. Wisconsin, you need help. Credit…