Launching Statistics and Sentiments

The human condition in charts

Hi!

I'm Siobhan, thanks for being here!

Since college, I've lived on three continents working as a policy researcher, grad student, writing teacher, landscaper, journalist, and more.

I just completed a one-year journalism fellowship at Vox focusing on global development, agriculture, and climate. During this time, I discovered my passion for charts (see here, here, and here). That's what I'll be doing here: writing one post a week around an interesting chart.

Note October 2024, if you’re new here: the general goals of this Substack remain the same, but one post a week was overly ambitious, and making the charts was taking too much time. I’m now publishing 1-2 posts a month, largely chartless, but still with a focus on data, the human condition, and all I discuss here!

I have two related goals (for this Substack, for life). The first is to try to understand the world through as many lenses as possible; I think data can provide some fascinating insights about what makes us who we are and the world what it is.

My second goal is to work to ensure people born without my privileges can have the same opportunities to thrive that I have. This is a lot more important and difficult than personal understanding, and I'm not hubristic enough to think I'll even make a dent in the world's problems, but this means that topics like climate change and food systems and anti-poverty policy will be the focus of many of these charts.

I'll be writing beyond these specific topics, though. The best way to sum up my life philosophy (right now) is probably from this blog post:

My answer to why I want to do what I want to do has started to be something like this: I want a world in which anyone can sit watching a Delhi sunset, even if they are women alone. That they can spend time with their families without worrying how to feed them. That they have time and resources to explore the physical traces of their histories and the paths of their spiritual beliefs. That they have no constraints to putting on their good clothes and going to a dance. That they don’t die of pollution or malaria before they are old enough to grasp these things.

I could go on, but it’s beginning to sound naïve – the point is, you don’t work in sanitation for the sake of sanitation or vaccines for the sake of vaccines, you work on them so humans can thrive.

What is human thriving, ultimately? Les Mis seems to get to it, somehow, but I can’t explain how. I can only so easily tell you what it’s not.

So I want to try to explore human thriving through the lens of data. I won't be able to do this, of course, so the charts will hopefully paradoxically reveal to us some of the mysteries that data is unequipped to handle. We'll see.

A bit more about my background: I've studied economics, sociology, and public policy, and to a lesser extent philosophy, religion, linguistics, English, and four other languages I won't name here lest you ask me to speak them. I try to write books and sometimes poetry; I like 19th century novels although I can only really read two per year. I like biking and cooking and generally being outdoors. Romance, however you want to define it, fascinates me. I deeply love my family and friends and spend way too much time living on their couches. My favorite discovery of the last couple years has been long train rides, which has led to an interest in urbanism and long conversations with strangers.

These things will all inform what I write about, and how.

For the next few days, I'll be taking on the Sisyphean task of relearning R and Python. If you find any cool charts, please let me know!

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