Loneliness, life satisfaction, and time

For The Pudding, Alvin Chang examines loneliness through the lens of individual responses from the American Time Use Survey:

In this story, we’ll go through 24 hours of a typical weekend day in 2021. We know what people did – and who they did it with – because, since 2003, the American Time Use Survey has asked people to track how they use their time.

By the end of the day, we’ll learn that Martin’s isolation isn’t unique. In fact, loneliness has become a far more common experience in the last few decades – and it was supercharged by the pandemic.

The heart of the piece is in the anti-aggregate view of individuals through 24 hours. See each person’s schedule, who they spend time with, and how that changes through the day. Sorting draws patterns. The scrolly clock on the right ticks. And it works on mobile. Chang makes the data immediately relatable.

See it.

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Evolution of Census questions

On the surface, the decennial census seems straightforward. Count everyone in the country and you’re done. But the way we’ve done that has changed over the decades. The Pudding and Alec Barrett of TWO-N looked at the changes through the lens of questions asked:

We looked at every question on every census from 1790 to 2020. The questions—over 600 in total—tell us a lot about the country’s priorities, norms, and biases in each decade. They depict an evolving country: a modernizing economy, a diversifying population, an imperfect but expanding set of civil and human rights, and a growing list of armed conflicts in its memory. What themes and trends will you notice?

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Data-driven hipster reading list

When it comes to reading lists, we usually look for what’s popular, because if a lot of people read something, then there must be something good about it. Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas for The Pudding took it the other direction. Using checkout data from the Seattle Public Library, they looked for books that haven’t been checked out in decades.

Also: How cool is it that there’s an API to access library checkout data?

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Map of the most popular people replacing the cities they lived in

For The Pudding, Matt Daniels and Russell Goldenberg used Wikipedia pageviews to replace city names with each city’s most popular resident:

Person/city associations were based on the thousands of “People from X city” pages on Wikipedia. The top person from each city was determined by using median pageviews (with a minimum of 1 year of traffic). We chose to include multiple occurrences for a single person because there is both no way to determine which is more accurate and people can “be from” multiple places.

So you end up with LeBron James for Akron, Barack Obama for Chicago, etc.

Fun.

See also the (non-data-driven) USA song map, which inspired this one. My favorite in this map genre is the series from R. Luke DuBois, who used online dating profiles to replace city names with the most unique personal qualities.

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High school basketball players who make it to the NBA

Right in my wheelhouse, Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas for The Pudding looked at where top high school basketball recruits end up in the NBA (if they’re drafted at all). I like how you get the distributions at each level and the path of each player. The distributions build using animation, which is something I’ve been interested in as of late.

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A visual analysis of jean pockets and their lack of practicality

Frustrated with the size of pockets on women’s pants, Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas for The Pudding, measured pocket sizes in 20 popular jean brands. They compared men’s and women’s pockets and calculated what actually fits in the mix of sizes.

[W]e programmatically determined whether various everyday items could fit in an otherwise empty pocket in jeans that aren’t being worn. (If an object won’t fit in the pocket of a pair of jeans on the hanger, it certainly won’t fit when you’re wearing them.) Only 40 percent of women’s front pockets can completely fit one of the three leading smartphone brands. Less than half of women’s front pockets can fit a wallet specifically designed to fit in front pockets. And you can’t even cram an average woman’s hand beyond the knuckles into the majority of women’s front pockets.

Impressive and informative work.

It reminds me of the Amanda Cox graphic that compared women’s dress sizes for different brands in 2011. There’s also the broken waistline measurement.

Let’s just all wear sweats from now on.

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Data-centric view of birth control

Birth control is one of those topics often saved for private conversations, so people’s views are often anecdotal. Someone knows what their friend, family member, etc used, but not much else. Amber Thomas for The Pudding provides a wider view of birth control using data from the CDC’s ongoing National Survey of Family Growth.

You see what other people use, how the method changes with age, and side effects. There’s a Clippy-like character for added information on the different methods. So there’s a good amount of information there to make the choice that’s right for you.

Sidenote on the NSFG data: I looked at the data a few times. It’s a good, messy dataset to explore if you want some practice.

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Gender representation in comic books

Amanda Shendruk for The Pudding analyzed how genders are represented differently in comic books, focusing on “naming conventions, types of superpowers, and the composition of teams to see how male and female genders are portrayed.” The charts are good, but I’m pretty sure the animated GIFs for a handful of female characters make the piece.

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