28-02-2025
Who controls the Murdoch family trust, good pie charts and the baby boom
Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week's newsletter we have charts on the melting of glaciers around the world, how the baby boom reshaped populations in many different countries, who controls the Murdoch family trust, how Germany's economic strength became a weakness and what it looks like to run the game Pong on hundreds of browser tabs.
The rise of far-right, anti-immigration parties could speed up population decline in Europe, according to an analysis of population projection data by my colleague Alex Clark in the UK.
Anti-immigration politics is on the rise across the EU, as shown by the gains made by far-right parties in elections on 2024 and 2025.
In this visual feature, Alex uses immigration data and population projections to show how the population of each European country would change with and without immigration. In most countries, limiting immigration would speed up population decline and result in countries becoming older on average as the number of working-age people falls relative to elderly people.
NB: Other contenders for this edition's Guardian Data Highlight™ included this hand-drawn chart of Clive Palmer's political donations and this visual feature about record-breaking heat in 2024.
1. Who has a piece of the pie? A good chart about the Murdoch family trust
Good pie charts are few and far between, so we knew that our discerning Crunch readers would be pleasantly surprised to see this wonderful chart from the New York Times magazine:
The graphical feature makes good use of the pie chart format to show what proportion of the family trust each Murdoch family member controls, and how that might change when Lachlan Murdoch succeeds Rupert.
2. More good pie charts? What is going on
It's not news that due to global heating glaciers are melting faster and more extensively than in the past. New research from the GlaMBIE (Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise) team of scientists has brought together glacier measurements from around the world and refined and analysed it to make all of the data comparable.
Some of the findings are summarised in this graphic, which combines pie charts to show glacier mass loss for each glacier location, with annual changes shown as coloured bars underneath:
You can read the paper, and see some more figures, here.
3. Boom, baby, boom
Our World In Data has a typically excellent explainer about the postwar baby boom of the mid 1900s, which has a whole bunch of charts.
This one shows that the baby boom happened in many high-income countries – and not just nations directly involved in the second world war. Sweden and Switzerland did not actively participate in the war, but they also experienced significant increases in birthrates.
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4. Is the Wirtschaftswunder kaputt?
This extremely stylish visual essay from Reuters looks over the economic and political history of Germany and covers how, according to Reuters: 'Germany has gone in recent years from being Europe's economic powerhouse to becoming the euro zone's growth laggard'.
We loved how this feature integrated the design device of spraypaint and graffiti across all the elements – from the animated illustrations to the subtle texturing on the line charts.
Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space
How tariffs work
Chartography: collage your charts
German election results (in English): Reuters, the Guardian
Peter Dutton wants to cut public service jobs in Canberra. Here's what happened last time
More than 80% of new California properties are in high fire-risk areas
Finally a good reason to never close that browser tab you opened five years ago. Nolen Royalty, a software engineer known for a couple of other viral hits like One Million Checkboxes, has created a Pong game that runs in your browser tabs.
Nolen's blog post about the project is a really interesting read. It goes through many of the problems he encountered and how he worked through them – I wish more people would write like this about their projects.
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