📝 Data Essay of the month

Moving, as a child, is not always fun. You have to say goodbye to all your friends, your school, your house, and it’s sometimes hard to understand why your parents are making you do it. In this data-essay from The Pudding, Aaron Williams dissects what would’ve happened had he stayed in his childhood home in Gardena, South California, rather than move to the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of 7. He dives into the economic and demographic factors, showing that maybe, it was all worth it. Or not?

🎙️ Podcast of the month

In today’s world, from being stuck at home during the pandemic, to being displaced from your house due to climate changes, our idea of “home” has and continues to change. And yet, Gaston Bachelard’s book “The Poetics of Space”, an interweaving of philosophy with architecture which examines the importance of creating a home within a space, still rings true today, and this podcast from the CBC’s Ideas segment will prove it to you. You might say it’s easy to find the beauty in your home, when it’s a quaint riverside stone house in the French countryside. Perhaps. But take a listen, and you’ll see that it might be more universal than you think.

🏛️ Exhibition of the month

The hallmark of so many homes across the world, whether you go there for the meatballs or the door handles named after Swedish fishing villages, IKEA is an institution. This is a key starting point in the current exhibition at the Barcelona museum of design, “100 IKEA objects we would have liked having at VINÇON”. VINÇON was a company building household goods, a key figure in the Barcelona design scene - until it closed shop in 2015. Based on an idea by Fernando Amat, one of the leading designers at VINÇON, the exhibit is a comparative study of the two brands - it’s not about picking sides, each has their own -, and it prompts the question: what if VINÇON had been today’s IKEA?

🗺️ Data mappings of the month

“Mapping Inequality” is a project by historians and data analysts that brings to light the invisible boundaries of “redlining” during the New Deal in 1930s USA — a discriminatory practice that denied certain neighborhoods access to financial service. By visualizing these historical maps, this mapping visualization reveals the stark divide between “safe” green zones and “risky” red areas, making visible the systemic inequalities that shaped urban America.

And unfortunately, that’s far from being the only example of how invisible structural discrimination is embedded into our environments. Take the devastating floods in Valencia, from a month ago. Turns out that a substantial amount of the houses affected by the floods were built during the 2008 housing crisis, even though the elevated risk of inundation was already known. It’s a messed-up testament to how economic desperation and short-term gains often take precedence over long-term safety and equity.

🌐 Website of the month

But to finish off on a more positive note, we wanted to share a little gem of a find, the Window Swap website. Just click to teleport to someone else’s window, somewhere across the world. You can even share yours! From a quaint Athenian balcony, to Egyptian palm trees and a cat in the New Delhi fig tree, nothing better than to nurture a bit of wanderlust. Well… windowlust?

Unfortunately, as wonderful as it was to have you in the land of Data-Oz, it’s finally time for you to go back to Kansas (or wherever you are). Close the newsletter and tap your heels together three times - but wait! One last thing before you leave…

From the Munchkins of Data, a fond goodbye,

May your insights soar and your queries fly xx