US spending on Ukraine

For NYT’s The Upshot, Bianca Pallaro and Alicia Parlapiano break down the United States’ $13.6 billion in emergency spending to help Ukraine against Russia.

They start with an overview treemap and then zoom in on each spending category with a new section. A thumbnail for each section keeps you oriented with each static image.

Over the years, the treemap has been NYT’s clear go-to for showing any kind of spending categories. You can see an evolution from interactive tool meant for exploration and the desktop to this most recent piece made to read and work on mobile. It seems like a pretty good indicator for visualization on the web as a whole.

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Price increases people have noticed

Inflation is high. For NYT’s The Upshot, Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Quoctrung Bui busted out the word cloud to show the price increases people noticed in February. As you might expect, the things that people purchase more often appear higher on the list, because the changes are easier to track.

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Distribution of snowfall estimates to show uncertainty

For NYT’s The Upshot, Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz show the full distribution of expected snowfall in your area instead of just the middle:

The range can be wide. That’s because predicting snow remains tricky, especially several days out, said Alex Lamers, a warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service. Getting a snowfall total right requires predicting the path of a storm correctly, estimating the amount of precipitation and understanding additional factors — like the temperature high in the atmosphere, or wind speeds close to the ground — that can influence the snow’s density.

The Weather Man with Nicolas Cage is such an underrated movie.

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Weighted Olympic medal counts

To decide who’s doing best at the Olympics you have to define what “best” means. Do you go by total medal count? Do you give more weight to gold medals over silver and bronze? Josh Katz, for NYT’s The Upshot, has been updating an interactive that ranks countries based on how you answer.

Each heatmap represents a country. The horizontal axis represents how much more a silver is worth over a bronze, and the vertical axis is how much a gold is worth over a silver. So the bottom left corner is all medals equal. Color represents possible ranking. The list of countries on the right updates as you move the cursor over spots.

Katz has been updating for each Olympics since PyeongChang 2018. It’s my favorite medal count tracker. I like the original best, which spaced countries in the list when there were ties.

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Charts showing Tom Brady’s standout career

Tom Brady announced his retirement from the National Football League, which ends a long career that stands out from the rest. As required by law, when it comes to sports records over time, The Upshot made four line charts that show cumulative stats for Brady and his peers.

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False positives with prenatal tests for rare conditions

Sarah Kliff and Aatish Bhatia for NYT’s The Upshot look at the uncertainty of prenatal tests for rare conditions. For some tests, the results are more often wrong than they are right, which causes issues when expecting parents don’t know that.

Along with square pie charts, the piece goes into more detail with unit charts to explain what the percentages mean from a counts point of view. So if a reader doesn’t quite know what a false positive is before reading, they will have a better idea after.

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All the provisions in the Build Back Better bill

For NYT’s The Upshot, Alicia Parlapiano and Quoctrung Bui outlined all of the provisions of Biden’s Build Back Better bill and where the $2 trillion over 10 years will come from. A treemap provides an overview that sticks to the top of the page as you scroll through the table of line items.

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Spending bill in a treemap box

Margot Sanger-Katz and Alicia Parlapiano for NYT’s The Upshot broke down a Democrat spending proposal. I like the lead-in treemap that shows the proposed components and the box that it needs to squeeze into:

I’ve seen treemaps that transition into different sizes, but I don’t think I’ve seen a box drawn on the outside of the treemap for comparison. It feels natural.

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Black mortality gap

Anna Flagg, for NYT’s The Upshot, used dots arranged as a stacked area chart to show the difference between two mortality rates. Each dot represents 10 people, and they start as a random cloud. A transition to show rate by age lends focus to both an absolute and relative count.

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Falling spin rates in baseball after rule enforcement

NYT’s The Upshot analyzed spin rate on pitches before and after enforcing a ban on sticky substances that provide more grip on the ball. The rule has been in place for decades but wasn’t enforced. However, there’s been more strikeouts than usual, which makes for less exciting sports, which means less people watch, and therefore, the league makes less money. So, bye sticky stuff.

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