Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week’s newsletter we have charts on what your brain looks like before, during and after magic mushrooms; an EXTREMELY detailed map of voting across Europe; updated projections of world population, country-by-country; a roundup of US politics stuff, and more!
But first … are things getting better or worse? Take the quiz!
Between the climate crisis, natural disasters, the rising cost of living and never-ending housing crises, it can feel like there’s nothing but bad news out there. But on many measures the world is actually getting better.
We’ve made an interactive quiz where you can see how well can you pick the trend for 10 measures ranging from youth crime to daily commute times.
For some matters it’s subjective as to whether a trend upwards or downwards represents an improvement or a decline – marriage rates being a good example, alongside the share of people living in cities. But often the most important factor in how we perceive these statistics is how it is portrayed in the media.
You can take the quiz here, or if you want to test your knowledge about the US economy in light of the upcoming election, here’s another quiz we made with our American colleagues.
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. The rise of the French left (and right) in one handy chart
Tom Février and Marie Patino at Bloomberg have produced this excellently succinct chart (it’s sort of a stacked bar sankey combo … a bankey?!) which shows the decline of Macron’s Renaissance party and allies, and the formation of the new left and rightwing blocs:
You can see the full chart, plus more (including a ternary scatterplot 😍) at Bloomberg’s election results page here.
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2. How the world’s population is expected to change by 2100
The UN has released an updated analysis of world population that presents population projections to the year 2100 based on “a range of plausible outcomes at the global, regional and national levels”.
Here, SBS Australia has produced a neat interactive graphic using this population data, allowing you to see the figures for any country.
Incidentally, this is our first reader-submitted chart! If you’ve seen or produced a great chart that you think our readers would be interested in, then please do let us know by replying to our email or writing to us at thecrunch@theguardian.com. (Also we now have almost 15,000 readers if you need an incentive other than the warm fuzzy feeling of sharing great data visualisation.)
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3. Paris Olympics 100 years on
This visual feature from the South China Morning Post has a whole bunch of great charts and illustrations looking at how things have changed since the last Paris Olympics in 1924.
I can’t believe pole vault athletes used to have to land in a pit filled with straw or sawdust! There are also charts showing how records have fallen over time in various races, maps, and more.
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4. An extremely detailed map of the European parliament elections
I don’t know about you, but I love an Extremely Detailed Election Map. This map from Zeit Online shows 83,255 local jurisdictions, mostly municipalities, coloured by the party group (based on factions formed in the European parliament) with the strongest vote in that area.
The map reveals some interesting sub-national trends, which the team at Zeit have highlighted in their article, such as the divide between metropolitan areas and their surrounds, how the south of Spain votes differently to the north, and divisions along former borders, such as in Poland.
Spotlight on … US politics
We couldn’t have an edition of The Crunch without some sort of acknowledgment that a lot of things have been happening in US politics, so here’s a few bits and pieces:
Prior to Joe Biden withdrawing, almost all the major polling averaging sites had Biden trailing Trump. Here are the poll aggregators from the Economist, the New York Times, 538, and RealClearPolling, most of which have been updated to show Kamala Harris v Trump.
According to Amy O’Kruk from CNN, Biden’s exit comes closer to the election than any other comparable US president.
Black battleground voters said they’d be happy about Biden dropping out if Harris were his replacement.
Nate Cohn, the NYT’s polling wizard, has an analysis of the polling around Harris and her chances of beating Trump.
Off the Charts … This is your brain on DRUGS
I’ve never been more upset that our newsletter system doesn’t support gifs than I was when I saw this paper from Nature, which featured an animated 3D-brain heatmap (which I will add into the web version of the newsletter!).
In the research, Siegel et al used MRI to track the brain changes before, during and after a high dose of psilocybin (a psychedelic drug derived from mushrooms).
Experts say the study helps explain why taking psilocybin can result in a distorted sense of space, time and self during a trip, as well as shed light on the mechanism by which it can help in the treatment of severe depression.
You can read the Guardian’s reporting on the study here.
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