The Crunch: the decline of Australian children’s TV; rivers in the sky; and where is western Europe?

Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch! In this week’s newsletter we have charts on how long it takes to get to space, the long recovery faced by people in Gaza after the ceasefire, differing views on what constitutes “western Europe”, how the US census measures race, and how special planes are used to measure hurricanes. But first … the decline of Australian children’s TV Streaming services such as Netflix, Stan and Disney+ may be forced to produce Australian content if the Albanese government’s long-awaited legislation passes parliament this week. Arts lobby groups are cautiously optimistic that the changes will lead to an increase in Australian drama, kids’ TV shows and documentaries being made. As this chart shows, after quotas specific to children’s shows, drama and documentary programs were removed in 2020 by the Coalition government, children’s TV production hit an all-time low of just 35 hours of content in the 2023-24 financial year: You can see a time-lapse of the construction of the Lego chart here. Entirely unrelated to kids TV or Lego, we ran an analysis last week looking at Australian politics, where the net zero climate target has become a political fault-line. The data clearly shows the Coalition would be better off tacking back to the centre if they ever want to form government again. You can read more here. Five charts from the fortnight *** 1. Long road to recovery Palestinians in Gaza are faced with one of the biggest recovery efforts in the history of modern warfare, and they are equipped with only rudimentary tools – shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, rakes, hoes and their bare hands. Our colleagues in the UK looked at the gruelling task of recovering the at least 10,000 bodies of Palestinians buried under more than 61m tonnes of debris. That amount of rubble is “20 times more than the combined mass of all debris generated by conflicts since 2008”, and the number of Palestinians killed and injured by unexploded bombs is rising. You can read more here. *** 2. How to measure a storm like Melissa Satellites can only capture so much data about big storms like Hurricane Melissa, which killed more than 70 people across the Caribbean last week, as well as causing billions of dollars in damage. Reuters have put together a visual explainer on “hurricane hunters” – planes that fly into the storms for hours on end to collect data. This is something we didn’t know existed. This story is an incredible mix of illustration, looping and step-through video taken from onboard an actual plane that flew into Melissa. See more here. *** 3. Deadly rivers in the sky Also on hurricanes, the Washington Post had this beautifully visualised feature investigating how global heating is fuelling more dangerous floods. The Post uses modelling to look at how and where there have been changes in integrated vapour transport (IVT), which is a measure of water vapour movement in the air. Increasing moisture levels are worsening flooding events, such as the devastating floods in Spain in 2024. *** 4. Where’s Wally western Europe? One of the trickiest things about making maps is that there is often disagreement about where and what things are. This is why one of our favourite genres of mapping contrasts different ideas about place. Sebastian Gräff from the European Correspondent has made a map in this vein – using datasets from various government and international institutions to ask “Where is western Europe?”. One of our favourite maps of this kind is this one from the New York Times a few years ago. It munges together thousands of reader submissions of what different parts of New York City are called. *** 5. The race question Pew Research Centre has put together a fascinating article on race in the US census that includes this neat side-swiping bar chart: Starting from the first census in 1790 – when “white males and females” made up 80.7% of the population, you can track through the evolution of both the census questions and responses. It was only in 2000 that Americans started being able to respond with more than one race when describing their racial identity. Read more here. Bookmarks A Google Maps-esque map of medieval Europe The reason pickleball is so loud ($) The 30 Day Map Challenge is on and this is one of our favourites so far. (Also this and this) Artificial intelligence is creeping into every part of life – work, therapy, school, art – and Australians are divided between fascination and fear Can faster buses really be free? A version of the dplyr R package aimed at gen Z Off the Charts Space Elevator is far and away our favourite thing of the last two weeks. The scrolly graphic was made by Neal Agarwal, who was also the person behind the amazing Deep Sea scrolly thing. Except now we’re scrolling up instead of down! Neal told The Crunch’s Josh Nicholas: “This page was a sequel to my Deep Sea project, which goes the other way into the depths of the ocean. It took about three months to complete, I did need to do a lot of research! Before making this page my knowledge of what goes on in the atmosphere was limited, and it’s definitely a rabbit hole haha.” Sign up If you would like to receive The Crunch to your email inbox every fortnight, sign up here.