Instagram Handle Of The Week: @monachalabi

Welcome to Beyond The Interview's latest series devoted to putting you on game to the best Instagram accounts you needed to be following, like, yesterday.

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1 in 3 high school best friends don’t make it through a year of college. I wrote a piece for @elleuk about making long-distance friendship work (it's based on data!). Source: Aaron Weiner's dissertation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 (yes, your random online thesis is interesting to me!) #datasketch

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Apr 9, 2018 at 9:33am PDT

Data is notoriously left-brain labor. Bar graphs, Venn diagrams, and timelines are often paired with pedantic research studies that are too difficult to interpret, and certainly not pleasing to eye. @monachalabi is changing all of that.

Mona Chalabi is a data journalist for The Guardian who totally reimagining how we consume data. Her illustrations play on traditional graphs and charts and include information about AIDS deaths in the U.S., the number of immigrant children being detained in U.S. facilities, and average voter wait times. Her colorful yet practical illustrations make the most challenging information absorbable to the average scroller, while keeping our timelines visually interesting to look at (sorry, Kourtney).

Mona uses art to makes facts and figures more comprehensible, completely destroying the expectation that only Harvard-graduated politicians can understand national statistics. @monachalabi is the most essential Insta account for 2019, a year when being informed is absolutely crucial. Left-brainers and right-brainers, unite!

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Felipe Gómez Alonzo died on Christmas eve while in the "care" of US immigration officials. He was 8 years old. He died less than 3 weeks after 7 year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, drawn here. At times I forget just how dire this ongoing situation is. But children depend on adults not forgetting them. There are approximately 15,000 children right now in federally contracted shelters. That number has risen from 12,800 in September. (I drew this graphic last week for @guardian_us). If you can, donate to @raicestexas which provides free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrants or @aclu_nationwide or, especially if you're Spanish speaking, volunteer. It's so much more meaningful than an Instagram like. Source: New York Times estimates based on information reported to members of Congress, December 2018.

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Dec 27, 2018 at 9:19am PST

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The 2nd of my 4 horsemen of the 2018 apocalypse: the way we’re destroying the planet. Source: Munich Re, 2018 #climatechange

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Dec 20, 2018 at 7:28am PST

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During his term in office, from 1989 to 1993, George HW Bush’s homophobia contributed to Washington’s culture of denial about the spread of HIV. He emphasized “behavioral change” rather than treatment and described same-sex relationships as “lifestyles that are, in my view, not the normal lifestyle”. This is the first illustration in a new weekly column I'm writing for the Guardian. If you have questions for the next one, send them my way! Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2008

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Dec 8, 2018 at 7:10am PST

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The researchers controlled for factors like target type, number of fatalities, and whether or not the perpetrators were arrested before reaching these final statistics. Source: A forthcoming study from Kearns et al, University of Alabama which analysed terror attacks from 2006 to 2015

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Jul 20, 2018 at 6:24am PDT

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A big overlap. If you want to understand anxiety better, I recommend you read @aparnapkin, @jonronson and @mackie_bella. Source: Johansson R, et al. Depression, anxiety and their comorbidity in the Swedish general population, PeerJ, 2013 #anxiety #depression

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Dec 23, 2018 at 9:51am PST

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This is what happens when people of color live in places with a lack of poll workers and voting machines. These numbers come from the 2012 presidential election. [Image description: People waiting in line. Nationwide, average wait times to vote were 12 minutes for white voters, 13 minutes for Native Americans, 15 minutes for Asian Americans, 19 minutes for Latinos, and 23 minutes for African Americans] Source: CCES, 2012 (it's a 50,000+ person national sample survey administered by YouGov which is analyzed by Harvard University).

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Nov 8, 2018 at 10:45am PST

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We need to talk about guns and we need to talk about masculinity. There have been at least 97 mass shootings that were indiscriminate rampages in public places where four or more victims were killed by the attacker. Two were committed by a woman, and 1 was committed by a man and a woman together. The rest were all men. To put it another way, 816 people have been killed in US mass shootings since 1982, only 12 of them were killed by women. Standing in solidarity with all the students who are leaving their classrooms today to demand that congress *finally* do something about this. #enough #datasketch Source: Mother Jones, 2018

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Mar 14, 2018 at 8:41am PDT

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Here's some data that teachers can use for Black History Month. There's a link in my bio to the original spreadsheet and I'm giving a talk at Math For America tonight about how students can make this stuff. Source: Census Bureau, 1890-2016 EDIT: Maryland should be one shade lighter in 2010 & 2016 Biiiig thanks to @eleanorcaseysarah, @momannwill and @jennydeluxe for their input on this one! #blackhistorymonth #datasketch

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Feb 1, 2018 at 9:45am PST

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Calling all criminologists! This data was published by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence in 1989 - why hasn't anyone done any more recent research?? Please help me to update this important statistic. Here’s some more recent facts: most women who kill their male partners say their motive was self-defense. And 70-80% of all incarcerated women say they've experienced intimate partner violence according to NRCDV's 2015 research. Swipe right to see image details.

A post shared by Mona Chalabi (@monachalabi) on Jan 12, 2019 at 9:14am PST

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