Author: Brendan Barry

  • We’re a Long Way from Kansas

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    Brendan Barry
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    I had something else for today, but this morning I opened the door and found my morning paper. Nothing terribly special. No massive headline. No large front-page graphic. See what I mean? But then as I bent down to pick it up, I spotted a little tree map. But it turned out it wasn’t a…

  • What It Is to be Asian American

    What It Is to be Asian American

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    Brendan Barry
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    Pew recently released a report into the Asian American experience. The report used 66 different focus groups to gather feedback and then summarised that with quotes, video bits, and lots of text. But at the beginning of the report was a nice little graphic that detailed the composition of the focus groups. This is not…

  • Europe By Rail

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    Brendan Barry
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    Many of us have pent up travel demand. Covid-19 remains with us, lingering in the background, but it’s largely from our front-of-mind. For those of my readers in Europe, or just curious how superior European rail infrastructure is over American, this piece from Benjamin Td provides some useful information. It uses isochrones to map out…

  • The Great British Baking

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    Brendan Barry
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    Recently the United Kingdom baked in a significant heatwave. With climate change being a real thing, an extreme heat event in the summer is not terribly surprising. Also not surprisingly, the BBC posted an article about the impact of climate change. The article itself was not about the heatwave, but rather the increasing rate of…

  • A New Downtown Arena for Philadelphia?

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    Brendan Barry
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    I woke up this morning and the breaking news was that the local basketball team, the 76ers, proposed a new downtown arena just four blocks from my office. The article included a graphic showing the precise location of the site. For our purposes this is just a little locator map in a larger article. But…

  • Small Dog Days of Summer

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    Brendan Barry
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    For my readers in the northern hemisphere, which is the vast majority of you, we are in the middle of meteorological summer, the dog days. And whilst my UK and Europe readers continue to bake under temperatures greater than 40ºC (104ºF), the northeast United States and Philadelphia in particular is looking at a heatwave starting…

  • Legendary Adjustments

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    Brendan Barry
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    The other day I was reading an article about the coming property tax rises in Philadelphia. After three years—has anything happened in those three years?—the city has reassessed properties and rates are scheduled to go up. In some neighbourhoods by significant amounts. I went down the related story link rabbit hole and wound up on…

  • Warming Towards Women Leaders

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    Brendan Barry
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    We are going to start this week off with a nice small multiple graphic that explores the reducing resistance to women in positions of leadership in Arab countries. The graphic comes from a BBC article published last week. These kinds of graphics allow a reader to quickly compare the trajectory of a thing between a…

  • James Webb

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    Brendan Barry
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    It’s cool. In the darkness of space. We made it to the end of the week, a big week for space news. So with that, enjoy this illustration from xkcd about the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • It’s a Little Steamy Out There

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    Brendan Barry
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    And by out there I mean 1150 light years away. One of the five amazing images out of the first day’s announcement by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team was not a sexy photo of a nebula or a look back 13.5 billion years in time. Instead it was a plot of the amount…