Numlock Sunday: How To Read This Chart with Philip Bump

Photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to the great Philip Bump, who writes the newly independent newsletter How To Read This Chart. Bump departed the Washington Post earlier this year and relaunched the project independently, exactly the kind of bold leap for a data journalism newsletter that we have a lot of particular affection for here at Numlock.

I think the newsletter is a lot of fun and precisely the kind of thing that fans of Numlock might also enjoy. We talked all about data journalism, making and writing about charts, and what gets us the most excited these days about data on the internet.

Philip can be found at howtoreadthisch.art, which is a very charming domain.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Hey, Philip, thanks so much for coming back on.

I’m always happy to do so, sir.

You are an author, a newsletter writer, a fantastic journalist. I’m just such a big fan of your work. You have recently gone independent, and I wanted to talk all about your new project, and how it continues some of the work that you were doing over at the Washington Post, but also expands it and gets going in a fun direction. Before we dive into all this stuff, do you want to just tell folks a little bit about yourself and what you’re up to these days?

Sure. I spent about 11 years at the Washington Post and just earlier this year was moved over to the Opinion side. I don’t know how much backstory I need here. I was (in the middle of this year) given the opportunity to take a buyout if I was not necessarily aligned with the company’s vision moving forward, and I chose to do so. While I was at the Post, I’d had a newsletter called How to Read This Chart. The idea generally was to present data visualizations to people in a way that wouldn’t put them off, and would make them more comfortable with them.

It was mostly a vehicle for me to make stupid jokes about stuff. It went well. I have revived that outside of the Washington Post. It’s available at howtoreadthisch.art, which is a domain I’m very proud of. That’s what I’m doing now: writing on my personal blog, which people have done, and doing a newsletter.

Excellent. Yeah. Your initial impetus to do this, it seemed, was to start training people on how to understand charts. I remember the last time that we chatted, it was not aiming necessarily for beginners, but maybe folks who had a little bit of discomfort in the space at this large national newspaper that you were working at.

How has it evolved since then? Obviously, I enjoy your newsletter quite a bit. I think that it’s definitely broadened out a bit since then and has a chance to get some cool stuff in there. So, what’s the process been?

Yeah. I mean, honestly, the original impetus for it was I had a book that was coming out in the beginning of 2023. As I was writing the book, which has 130-odd charts in it, my editor for Viking was like, “Hey, what, you’re going to need a ‘how to read this chart’ for all these various charts in here. Cause I don’t know how to make sense of half of these.” Since I wanted to promote the book, I was like, “Hey, well, Washington Post, I want to do a newsletter.”

They said, “Okay, fine.”

I said, “Well, let’s just call it How to Read This Chart.” You’re right. The original idea was, “Hey, how do I make it so that people see data visualizations that are slightly more complex than average data visualizations in their day-to-day life, and don’t immediately go, “I don’t want to look at this thing.” That was the general idea.

One of the reasons that I think people read my stuff is that I add my personality to it, and they can either get mad about that or enjoy it. That’s probably about an equal mix. Instead of just making this like, “Here’s how you read a scatterplot,” it was like, “Here’s how you read a scatterplot. And here’s a picture of my dog. And also, here’s a joke about trees or whatever it happens to be.” I just leaned into it being me and got a decent number of subscribers and spun up this new iteration, which has got a decent number of subscribers already. At the very least, my personality is not so sufficiently off-putting that it is an immediate failure. That is how I describe myself in positive terms.

What are some installments of the newsletter or charts that you think really define where your taste is coming from on this stuff? What are some things that you’ve been able to cover that you think are either one of the more important stories going on or one of the more interesting visualizations going on. Just giving folks a little taste.

I did one fairly recently that I think has a good overview of what’s included. So I took all the subpoenas that have been released by Senator Chuck Grassley that were related to the January 6th riot and created a visualization mapping the connections between the people that were mentioned. For example, subpoenas are seeking information about so-and-so and so-and-so. Therefore, so-and-so and so-and-so have a connection. I made this data visualization, which showed all those connections.

Another section of the newsletter was looking at new research into the ways in which data visualizations can be used as a misinformation tactic, including (and especially by) the president. Then there was a section that was looking at how Tesla sales had changed since the beginning of 2024, relative to how counties in New York state (which produces publicly available information about car ownership) had changed over the course of Elon Musk jumping into politics. One of my favorite sections, and I think one of readers’ favorite sections, is called chart attack, which is just a bunch of charts that I saw that are interesting.

It’s a good mix. It’s a network graph of things connected: some maps with little arrows on them from the Tesla thing, some call-outs from some academic research, chart attack and a bunch of different visualizations. It’s all data visualization oriented, but it still tells different stories in a way that’s interesting to me, and that’s always what I have written for and seems to work out.

It’s definitely been a lot of fun to watch how going independently has given you a little bit more latitude to cover some stuff when it comes to things that the Washington Post has got a little sensitive about lately.

I will say that I always had pretty free rein at the Post generally and in How to Read This Chart, even until the end. I had some things in the latter months of the Post that got spiked or reworked in a way that I wasn’t super enthusiastic about — nothing to the point where I was just standing on my foot. I can only think of one thing that really got nixed in How to Read This Chart. This was a couple of years ago. This is right at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the 2022 iteration of that invasion by Russia. It was at a time when gas prices were spiking. So I did this little thing that I thought was funny (and still think it’s funny), where I was saying how much it would cost to make Molotov cocktails to throw at Russian tanks based on gas prices.

That was seen as perhaps outside of what the Washington Post wanted to put out to the world.

I get why they weren’t enthusiastic about it. But I never really had those sorts of limitations; that was the only thing that really crossed the line. There was also one where it was like a weather map that looked like a penis that they wouldn’t allow me to embed in the thing, but I linked it. I didn’t really have a lot of restrictions at the Washington Post. It certainly is the case now that even if I was tempted to self-censor at all, which I never really was there,I no longer am.

Great. Yeah. I mean, it’s always great to get the undiluted Pbump.

I wouldn’t say it’s always great to get that, but it can be.

What are your ambitions for this thing? Where do you want to see it go? What do you hope people get out of it?

I just want people to enjoy it, honestly. Not to get too metaphysical or anything on this, I used to think that one’s life should be dedicated to serious work. I used to think that that was fine to be an entertainer and so on and so forth. But that’s not what I thought was useful or how you ought to spend your eight decades on this earth. Then I had this dog in New York City when she was a mix, (this is not where you expect this story to go, but tough luck). I had this dog and I was living in New York City and she was a mixture of a pit bull and a bassett hound. So she looked like a pit, but she had these little stumpy basset hound legs, super cute. Her name was Lucy. I used to walk around all the time and the way in which people just enjoy being around Lucy reshaped the way that I thought about this.

This is decades ago, so this is not like a new realization I had, but it just reframed my. I’s okay to bring something to the world that people enjoy. That has value, even if you’re not like incessantly fighting for social justice or ameliorating the world. There’s value to those little things. I like to think of the newsletter as a way to just be fun and informative and talk about the world and to combine those things. It’s a balance that it generally strikes. That’s what I enjoy about it, too.

I think back to some of the work that I’ve seen in your newsletter, in particular. One of the ones that I liked the most was the guy who got every croissant in some European town. I think that having this occasional whimsy in addition to unrelenting smart coverage is an ultimately necessary element of good work.

Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, one of my favorite things that I ever did (this is back in the old Washington Post iteration of the newsletter) was this guy in the Netherlands who literally put a camera on top of his house and took a picture of the sky every minute or every half hour or something like that over the course of the year. Then he plotted those photos basically, from dawn to dusk, from January 1st to December 31st, in the grid. It just made this extremely cool visualization of the movement of the sun and the patterns of clouds and cloudy days and the seasons, all from just doing this one simple thing.

Things like that have a combination of weird and entertaining and informative and unique. In the same way that finding all the croissants and visualizing different croissant styles can find that same sweet spot at the center of that particular Venn diagram, just to bring it back to data visualizations.

Back in my FiveThirtyEight days, I always felt like the scoops that I was always the most envious of were never the Times or things like that. It was always “guy who had more time on his hands, who was able to get a more fun and clever visualization out of watching every episode of Friends faster than I could.”

I think that within data visualization, and I think that your newsletter really does demonstrate the breadth of this, the barriers to entry are rather low; oftentimes it’s just your own time and your own ability to keep a spreadsheet going.

No, you’re exactly right. I was doing a presentation to a group last month. One of the things I said is that so much of what can make an impression in the world is simply scale. If you just do something big and you take it to the extreme, that by itself can increase the size of your footprint, to extend the analogy awkwardly. When you have the time and interest and you just dive into something and you really, really take it further than anyone else is going to, that by itself has value.

When I did the subpoenas, it was not that there was anything particularly clever about it. When you looked at the networks, there wasn’t anything particularly surprising, right? But you took the time to build it out, and it was big, and it showed this complexity in a way that you might’ve intuited, but couldn’t immediately see. That is the value in it —spending that time doing that thing and making it big. That’s the thing that makes the difference in a lot of data visualizations and anything you do in your work, in your occupation, in your life.

Awesome. Well, this feels as good as any way to put a capstone on this. Where can folks find you? Where can they find your work, and what’s the protocol for subscribing here?

If you go to How to Read This Chart, which again is howtoreadthisch.art, or just go to pbump.net, there are lots of links there to sign up. The newsletter comes out every Saturday morning. It’s free. If you want to pay me money, go nuts. I’m not going to say no. I’m going back to this mid-1990s shareware style of newsletter, just to bring it back home. Obviously, I’d be happy to have people do so.

Alrighty. Thanks again. Thanks for coming on.

Mr. Hickey, it is my pleasure as always.

---

Edited by Crystal Wang

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber!

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.