Animal genders; the fall of the US dollar; and how many houses can Australia actually build?

The Guardian

18-07-2025

Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week's newsletter we have charts on what makes someone cool, animal genders in children's books, and a very bad year for the US dollar.
This week it emerged that Treasury has doubts about the Australian government achieving its ambitious target to build 1.2m new homes over five years.
That is a big number, but how does it compare to what we were likely to have managed anyway? Our latest One Big Chart shows the 1.2m target is significantly more than Australia has managed to build over a five-year period in the past few decades.
And it's not just that the target is ambitious – construction data shows we are already falling behind the required rate. This is something we highlighted earlier this year.
1. A devastating heatwave
Europe's 'early summer' heatwave has set records across the continent. The Financial Times ($) has put together some truly terrifying maps showing not just the extreme heat, but also low river flows affecting much of the EU.
As many as 2,300 people across 12 European cities died as a result of the June heatwaves, according to reporting from our UK colleagues. Two-thirds of the heat deaths in London were attributable to climate change.
2. What makes someone cool?
It's a question we've been asking our whole lives academics have attempted to answer with a series of experiments over a number of years, and in several countries. The study found that many of the traits associated with cool people – such as extroversion and adventurousness – are stable across different countries.
This is just one of the very nerdy charts you can find in the journal article.
3. Line goes down
We've featured a couple of US dollar line charts since Donald Trump's inauguration, but this one from Semafor a couple of weeks back is the cherry on top.
The dollar was already down 7% and on track for its worst year in modern history. Must be tired of all the winning.
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4. Gendered presumptions
The Pudding, one of our favourite websites, has an incredible deep dive into animal gender in children's books. It looks like an absolutely mammoth project, analysing hundreds of books as well as surveying 1,300 people.
There are wonderful charts like this below – showing only a few animals are consistently gendered female – as well as a searchable interactive.
'In the children's books, male animal characters appeared twice as often as female characters. Male pronouns appeared nearly three times as often in the survey results – particularly striking because there were more women respondents.'
We really encourage you to read (and see) the rest here.
Accelerating increase in the duration of heatwaves under global warming – Nature Geoscience
Trump's 'big beautiful bill' blows US emissions goal by 7bn tonnes – Carbon Brief
Why was the flooding in Texas so deadly? – The Economist ($)
Hier ist die Hitze am extremsten (Here is where the heat is most extreme) – Die Zeit ($)
The floor is lava – Reuters
This piece by Christoph Niemann in the New York Times Magazine is something in between an interactive, an animation and a comic. It's full of beautiful visual metaphors.
And while this illustration below refers to the unoriginality of generative AI, it could well be a commentary on many modelling efforts in statistics and data science:
Read the full piece here.
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