Oct. 20, 2023, 2:01 p.m.
Romance novel covers, an invisible epidemic, and more data-driven clocks
Four new visual essays from The Pudding
The Pudding
The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.
We have *four* new projects we are excited to share with you!
What Does a Happily Ever After Look Like? — We looked at over 1,400 romance novel covers from 2011 to 2023 to find out how the visuals have changed.
24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic — Watch 24 hours of an American day, and see the invisible crisis hiding in plain sight.
A Clock Where the Time is Made of News Headlines — Exactly what it sounds like!
A Clock Where the Time is the Population of a US Place — Also exactly what it sounds like!
As always, thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe and allowing us to share our work with your inbox. Special shout-out to Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!
Romance Novel Covers
It you think of the long haired Fabio — who has graced over 400 covers — holding his tragic maiden when you think of a romance novel, you’re not alone, but you are a bit outdated. Contributor Alice Liang looked at over 1,400 romance novel covers from 2011–2023 to find trends in the level of raunchiness, the art style, and the representation of racial diversity. You can even create and download your own reading list from the piece!
Invisible Epidemic
Follow “Martin,” (and others!) through 24 hours in a typical day. Martin's a regular guy in his 60s, but he's pretty isolated. He doesn't have a job. He doesn't have a wife or partner, nor does he have children in his home. He just doesn't interact with many people. Scroll through the hours, and see how contributor Alvin Chang exposes a loneliness epidemic using data from the American Time Use Survey.
A Clock Where the Time is Made of News Headlines
The third iteration of our Data Clock project converts numbers in headlines into hours and minutes, and reveals our (sometimes morbid) fascination with counting things.
A Clock Where the Time is the Population of a US Place
The fourth iteration of our Data Clock project finds a US place with a population equal to the time. With populations less than or equal to 1,259, we can guarantee there are some places you’ve never heard of!
Quick asides!
We’re excited to announce that 3 stories from our contributors made it to the Information is Beautiful Awards shortlist: The Sounds of CDMX, On Upward Mobility, and Why the Super Rich are Inevitable. The winners will be announced on November 4th.
We’ve made the annual update to our morphing Air Jordans piece and added the latest release, the AJ XXXVIII (38).
Our friend Walt Hickey’s new book “You Are What You Watch” — filled with over 100 data visualizations about movies and TV — comes out October 24th. You can preorder it here and get a limited edition data-visual art print from the book: “Superpowers of Marvel Comics.” Be sure to follow our Instagram account where we will be giving away 3 copies in November!
Have a cool essay idea that you want to make? Check out our pitch guidelines.
Want to hire our team to produce data-led, visual stories? Check out our sister studio, Polygraph.
#stuffwelove at The Pudding
Here’s also some special links that are regularly shared on our Friends of The Pudding slack-channel (get access via Patreon)!
The rise of anti-trans bills in the US — Reuters uses a giant snaking Sankey diagram to track 142 bills aimed at restricting gender-affirming healthcare for trans and gender-expansive people
What special about this number? — Erich Friedman catalogues distinctive facts about numbers from 0–9999
Generative AI exists because of the transformer — the Financial Times walks you through how AI and large language models (LLM) work
I Want a Better Catastrophe — An interactive flow chart that works through the question “Is climate change for real?”
Thank you subscribers! And take care! — Jan