John Burnmurdoch
Stories, stats & scatterplots for @FinancialTimes, Daily updates of the coronavirus trajectory tracker, john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, #dataviz
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by John Burnmurdoch
“@Rukmini @WestlandBooks @LabyrinthAgency Congrats Rukmini! The book sounds fantastic, and that cover is brilliant!” (from X)
How do you see India? Fuelled by a surge of migration to cities, the country's growth appears to be defined by urbanisation and by its growing, prosperous middle class. It is also defined by progressive and liberal young Indians, who vote beyond the constraints of identity, and paradoxically, by an unchecked population explosion and rising crimes against women. Is it, though? In 2020, the annual population growth was down to under 1 per cent. Only thirty-one of hundred Indians live in a city today and just 5 per cent live outside the city of their birth. As recently as 2016, only 4 per cent of young, married respondents in a survey said their spouse belonged to a different caste group. Over 45 per cent of voters said in a pre-2014 election survey that it was important to them that a candidate of their own caste wins elections in their constituency. A large share of reported sexual assaults across India are actually consensual relationships criminalised by parents. And staggeringly, spending more than Rs 8,500 a month puts you in the top 5 per cent of urban India. In Whole Numbers and Half Truths, data-journalism pioneer Rukmini S. draws on nearly two decades of on-ground reporting experience to piece together a picture that looks nothing like the one you might expect. There is a mountain of data available on India, but it remains opaque, hard to access and harder yet to read, and it does not inform public conversation. Rukmini marshals this information—some of it never before reported—alongside probing interviews with experts and ordinary citizens, to see what the numbers can tell us about India. As she interrogates how data works, and how the push and pull of social and political forces affect it, she creates a blueprint to understand the changes of the last few years and the ones to come—a toolkit for India. This is a timely and wholly original intervention in the conversation on data, and with it, India.
Recommended by John Burnmurdoch
“@NaTPMpode We have the book! I love it 😀” (from X)
*WINNER OF THE JAMES BEARD AWARD FOR SINGLE SUBJECT!* SAVING TRADITIONS AND SHARING SKILLS, ONE GRANNY AT A TIME! "When you have good ingredients, you don't have to worry about cooking. They do the work for you." – Lucia, 85 Learn how to make pasta like Italian nonnas do. Inspired by the hugely popular YouTube channel of the same name, Pasta Grannies is a wonderful collection of time-perfected Italian pasta recipes from the people who have spent a lifetime cooking for love, not a living: Italian grandmothers. For a nonna, love is putting food on the table, and pasta is the perfect vehicle to make precious ingredients go further. Featuring easy and accessible recipes from all over Italy, you will be transported into the very heart of the Italian home to learn how to make great-tasting Italian food. From pici – a type of hand-rolled spaghetti that is simple to make – to lumachelle della duchessa – tiny, ridged, cinnamon-scented tubes that take patience and dexterity, every nonna has her own special recipe. Pasta Grannies brings together the huge diversity of these authentic dishes and also celebrates the expertise, life and extraordinary stories of the amazing women behind them.
Recommended by John Burnmurdoch
“@theneilrichards @ellenLupton @DataVizSociety @rkbrath @tiffylou Brilliant book! One of my most useful dataviz-related purchases” (from X)
by Ellen Lupton·You?
"Thinking with Type is to typography what Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is to physics."—I Love Typography The best-selling Thinking with Type in a revised and expanded second edition:Thinking with Type is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication. Ellen Lupton provides clear and focused guidance on how letters, words, and paragraphs should be aligned, spaced, ordered, and shaped. The book covers all typography essentials, from typefaces and type families, to kerning and tracking, to using a grid. Visual examples show how to be inventive within systems of typographic form, including what the rules are, and how to break them. This revised edition includes forty-eight pages of new content with the latest information on: • style sheets for print and the web • the use of ornaments and captions • lining and non-lining numerals • the use of small caps and enlarged capitals • mixing typefaces • font formats and font licensing Plus, new eye-opening demonstrations of basic typography design with letters, helpful exercises, and dozens of additional illustrations. Thinking with Type is the typography book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, and anyone else who works with words. If you love font and lettering books, Ellen Lupton's guide reveals the way typefaces are constructed and how to use them most effectively. Fans of Thinking with Type will love Ellen Lupton's new book Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers.