Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch. In this week’s newsletter we are going hard on maps. We have a map based on a Billy Joel song, a Lego US election map and much more.
For the non-map nerds (how many can there be?) there are also visuals on microplastics in the oceans, how mpox spreads and mutates, electric cars, and a beautifully illustrated scrolly. Millions of Australians in the fastest growing areas of our cities to schools, healthcare, third spaces or other basic infrastructure. As families are increasingly pushed out to the city fringes in search of affordable housing, it can take years for (often privately provided) infrastructure to catch up.
Check out our map and . *** Before your eyes glaze over, this isn’t about standing desks. Our former colleague Alvin Chang has created at the Pudding, this time exploring the divide between “sitters” (those doing mostly office jobs such as coding or legal work) and standers (restaurant servers or construction workers, etc).
It’s a great interactive to play around with. And from a technical perspective, the transitions are lovely. There’s a video version you can check out too.
And Alvin has written a to explain his thinking. *** A trigger warning that some of the beautiful illustrations in this are a bit confronting. But this is a great visual primer on a disease that a public health emergency of international concern.
*** When we talk about big global problems like the plastics crisis, it can feel a b.