3 Reasons for the Fertilizer and Food Shortage

Countries with the Highest Default Risk in 2022

The $100 Trillion Global Economy in One Chart

News Explainer: The Economic Crisis in Sri Lanka

Interest Rate Hikes vs. Inflation Rate, by Country

The Evolution of Media: Visualizing a Data-Driven Future

33 Problems With Media in One Chart

The Top Downloaded Apps in 2022

Synthetic Biology: The $3.6 Trillion Science Changing Life as We Know It

How Do Big Tech Giants Make Their Billions?

Countries with the Highest Default Risk in 2022

What Does It Take To Be Wealthy in America?

Household Income Distribution in the U.S. Visualized as 100 Homes

Interest Rate Hikes vs. Inflation Rate, by Country

Mapping the Migration of the World’s Millionaires

Explainer: What to Know About Monkeypox

Visualizing How COVID-19 Antiviral Pills and Vaccines Work at the Cellular Level

Mapped: The Most Common Illicit Drugs in the World

Visualizing The Most Widespread Blood Types in Every Country

Pandemic Recovery: Have North American Downtowns Bounced Back?

A Lifetime’s Consumption of Fossil Fuels, Visualized

Visualized: Battery Vs. Hydrogen Fuel Cell

Who’s Still Buying Fossil Fuels From Russia?

Mapped: Which Ports are Receiving the Most Russian Fossil Fuel Shipments?

Explainer: What Drives Gasoline Prices?

Ranked: The 20 Countries With the Fastest Declining Populations

Iconic Infographic Map Compares the World’s Mountains and Rivers

Mapped: A Decade of Population Growth and Decline in U.S. Counties

Mapped: The State of Global Democracy in 2022

Mapped: Solar and Wind Power by Country

Mapped: The 10 Largest Gold Mines in the World, by Production

The 50 Minerals Critical to U.S. Security

Visualizing China’s Dominance in Clean Energy Metals

The Periodic Table of Commodity Returns (2012-2021)

Visualizing the Abundance of Elements in the Earth’s Crust

Timeline: The Domestication of Animals

5 Things to Know About Europe’s Scorching Heatwave

What Are the Five Major Types of Renewable Energy?

Animation: The World’s Biggest Wind Turbines

Synthetic Biology: The $3.6 Trillion Science Changing Life as We Know It

Most people today—more than 8 in 10 Americans—get their news via digital devices, doing their reading on apps, listening to podcasts, or scrolling through social media feeds.

It’s no surprise then that over the last year, only one U.S. newspaper of the top 25 most popular in the country saw positive growth in their daily print circulations.

Based on data from Press Gazette, this visual stacks up the amount of daily newspapers different U.S. publications dole out and how that’s changed year-over-year.

The most widely circulated physical newspaper is the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by a long shot—sending out almost 700,000 copies a day. But it is important to note that this number is an 11% decrease since 2021.

Here’s a closer look at the data.

These papers, although experiencing negative growth when it comes to print, are still extremely popular and widely-read publications digitally—not only in the U.S., but worldwide. For example, the New York Times reported having reached 9 million subscribers globally earlier this year.

The one paper with increased print circulation was The Villages Daily Sun, which operates out of a retirement community in Florida. Elderly people tend to be the most avid readers of print papers. Another Florida newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, was the worst performer at -26%.

In total, 2,500 U.S. newspapers have shut down since 2005. One-third of American newspapers are expected to be shuttered by 2025. This particularly impacts small communities and leaves many across America in ‘news deserts.’

Regardless of print’s downturn, digital subscriptions remain much higher for most of these papers. As one example, The Washington Post has over 3 million online subscribers, compared to their 159,000 print readers.

To put things in perspective, around 24 million print papers now circulate throughout the U.S. on any given day. But looking back at the industry’s peak in the 1980s, almost 64 million were distributed on any given weekday.

And digital is not done growing. Newsroom hires have been ramping up for “digital-native” news sites—publications that started online and never had a print version. On the flipside, employment at traditional papers has more than halved since 2008.

American news media can be extremely divisive. Many newsrooms across the country play into fear, sensationalism, and partisan politics.

Digital news only makes this worse, utilizing algorithms designed to keep a person’s eyes on the page longer, pushing stories with narratives a person shows interest in, and often taking them down a rabbit hole of fringe information—sometimes towards the extremes.

Additionally, the business of journalism is an increasingly less lucrative industry. Most revenue comes from digital ads running on news sites—so rather than selling the news to consumers, it’s the time and attention of consumers that is being sold to advertisers. Furthermore, some of the best quality content is locked up behind subscription-based paywalls.

Print may actually be one way to avoid some of the more obvious issues, particularly because there’s no way to track the data on which stories you read. But all publications still have inherent bias, of course, and it’s clear that print papers are not bouncing back any time soon.

How Much Land does the U.S. Military Control in Each State?

How Much Land does the U.S. Military Control in Each State?

The $100 Trillion Global Economy in One Chart

Visualized: Which Countries are Dominating Space?

Who’s Still Buying Fossil Fuels From Russia?

Made in America: Goods Exports by State

Visualizing U.S. Crude Oil and Petroleum Product Imports in 2021

In this infographic, we rank the world’s 10 largest maritime shipping companies by container capacity and fleet size.

Did you know that 80% of the global goods trade is transported over sea? Given the scale of human consumption, this requires an enormous number of shipping containers, as well as ships to carry them.

At an industry level, container shipping is dominated by several very large firms. This includes Maersk, COSCO Shipping, and Evergreen. If you live along the coast, you’ve probably seen ships or containers with these names painted on them.

Generally speaking, however, consumers know very little about these businesses. This graphic aims to change that by ranking the 10 largest container shipping companies in the world.

Companies are ranked by two metrics. First is the number of ships they own, and second is their total shipping capacity measured in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). A TEU is based on the volume of a twenty-foot long shipping container.

The data used in this infographic comes from Alcott Global, a logistics consultancy. Fleet sizes are as of June 2021, while TEU capacity is from January 2022.

In this dataset, Maersk and MSC are tied for first place in terms of TEU capacity. This is no longer the case, as news outlets have recently reported that MSC has overtaken the former.

Trailing behind the two industry leaders is a mixture of European and Asian firms. Many of these companies have grown through mergers and acquisitions.

At the time of writing, Maersk is Denmark’s third largest company by market capitalization. The firm was founded in 1904, making it 118 years old.

The Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) has grown very quickly in recent years, catching up to (and surpassing) long-time leader Maersk in terms of TEU capacity.

The Swiss firm has increased its fleet size through new orders, acquisition of second-hand vessels, and charter deals.

COSCO Shipping is China’s state-owned shipping company. American officials have raised concerns about the firm’s expanding global influence.

For context, Chinese state-owned enterprises have ownership stakes in terminals at five U.S. ports. This includes Terminal 30 at the Port of Seattle, in which two COSCO subsidiaries hold a 33.33% stake.

Moving forward, any further Chinese interest in U.S. terminals will face an even more stringent regulatory environment. – Kardon (2021)

Evergreen is likely a familiar name, but not for the right reasons. In 2021, one of the company’s ships, Ever Given, became stuck in the Suez Canal, putting one of the world’s most important shipping routes out of commission for nearly a week.

To achieve better economies of scale, container ships are growing bigger and bigger. The following chart illustrates this trend from 1970 to 2017.

Average capacity is being pulled upwards by the arrival of mega-ships, which are ships that have a capacity of over 18,000 TEUs. Their massive size creates problems for ports that weren’t designed to handle such a high volume of traffic.

It’s worth noting that the largest ship today, the Ever Ace (owned by Evergreen), has a capacity of 24,000 TEUs. Watch this YouTube video for some impressive footage of the ship.

Bloomberg reports that shipping accounts for 3% of the world’s carbon emissions. If the industry were a country, that would make it the world’s sixth-largest emitter.

Due to the growth of ESG investing, shipping companies have faced pressure to decarbonize their ships. Progress to this day has been limited, but there are many solutions in the pipeline.

One option is alternative fuels, such as liquefied natural gas (LNG), hydrogen, or biofuels made from plants. These fuels could enable ships to greatly decrease their emissions.

Another option is to completely do away with fuel, and instead return to the centuries-old technology of wind power.

The mainstream shaving industry no longer fits the needs of modern society. This graphic shows why it’s time to rethink shaving

The art of shaving has a history rich with transformation that dates back to ancient civilizations. That is until the 20th century when mainstream plastic cartridge razors began to flood the market.

This graphic from Henson Shaving shows how mainstream plastic cartridge razors conflict with expectations of the modern world by being huge contributors to pollution.

The data also suggests that consumers could significantly benefit from switching over to using a safety razor. Let’s dive in.

The shaving industry is dominated by several corporate entities that rake in billions of dollars every year. In fact, the majority of razors on the market today are optimized for profit rather than sustainability and affordability.

The industry was worth $17 billion in 2021 and is poised to grow by 17%, reaching $20 billion by 2030. Within this large market, the U.S. is a key player. The country imports over half a billion razors a year—more than any other country. Overall, U.S. shavers go through 2 billion razors a year, which is roughly 12 per consumer on average.

How much waste does this create?

As it turns out, quite a lot. The 2 billion razors discarded annually cover an area of 700 acres—assuming the average disposable cartridge razor (without a handle) has a dimension of about 3 cm by 1 cm. To put that into context, that’s 2,400 Olympic sized swimming pools.

The other inefficiency involves consumer wallets. While on the surface disposable cartridge razors seem more affordable, this is far from the truth. While cartridge razors have a cheaper cost up front, they become more expensive incrementally over time. In fact, most consumers do not detect this, but they may actually end up paying 5-10 times more than safety razors over their lifetime.

On the other hand, safety razors require a larger upfront investment, but become progressively cheaper over the months and years. How is this possible? A cartridge razor costs between $2-4 in most markets, while a safety razor blade is a fraction of that at around 10-20 cents. What’s more, both typically last last for an average of 7 shaves.

We can better understand the total cost of ownership associated with shaving by looking at the costs over a few years.

Note on methodology: We assume a safety razor is $100 and a blade costs 20 cents to replace per 7 shaves while cartridge razors are $10 and cost $3 to replace the cartridge. This means a daily safety razor user would incur a 20 cent cost per week while someone who shaves only twice a week would incur about a 6 cent cost. A daily cartridge shaver would incur a $3 cost per week while someone who shaves twice per week would incur a 85 cent cost weekly.

Eventually, daily shavers see safety razors become cheaper at the 35th week, while those who shave twice a week recognize the savings around week 115. But given people spend an average of 3,000 hours in a lifetime shaving, the compounding effect translates into huge cost savings for the consumer no matter how often they shave.

There are several psychological phenomena at play that shape the financial decision making behind shaving.

First the endowment effect, which is when consumers place a higher perceived value on an item they own, over something they don’t. The endowment effect states that we assign a positive psychological bias to our possessions. For shaving, this means consumers are more likely to have a positive view towards their own razor over alternatives.

Next, is the sunk cost fallacy, which suggests that people are reluctant to abandon a behavior if they have already invested time or money into it. For shavers, this may mean sticking to a substandard shaving method or product because time or money has been spent acquiring the item, thus making us reluctant to change and accept potentially better ways.

These psychological factors are part of how the large corporate shaving companies build profitable lifetime consumers—but it’s time for change.

There’s evidence to suggest the modern day cartridge razors can lead to suboptimal outcomes for your wallet and the environment at large.

The Henson razor addresses these challenges head on.

Henson Shaving is going against the grain by selling one razor for one consumer to last a lifetime.

>>>Learn more about the last razor you’ll ever buy with Henson Shaving.

Extra, extra read all about it—these 25 popular U.S. newspapers are trending downwards in their daily print circulation year-over-year.

The U.S. military’s real estate portfolio is valued at $749 billion. Here’s a look at how much land the U.S. military controls in each state.

In this infographic, we rank the world’s 10 largest maritime shipping companies by container capacity and fleet size.

Bad weather, the war in Ukraine, and a shortage of fertilizer have led to fears of a global food crisis. Here are three factors you should…

This graphic shows a timeline of when 15 different animals became domesticated, based on archaeological findings.

Each year the average American consumes more than 23 barrels of petroleum products. What does a lifetime of fossil fuel consumption look like?

The $100 Trillion Global Economy in One Chart

Who’s Still Buying Fossil Fuels From Russia?

Ranked: The 20 Countries With the Fastest Declining Populations

Countries with the Highest Default Risk in 2022

What Does It Take To Be Wealthy in America?

33 Problems With Media in One Chart

News Explainer: The Economic Crisis in Sri Lanka

Timeline: The Domestication of Animals