Hungarian Election Victory Edition!
Plus a cool, new data archive, optical illusions, and jade plants
As a proud Hungarian-American (my mother’s side of the family is of 100% Austro-Hungarian descent), I have been very excited about the Hungarian election results. Seriously, it feels like 1989 all over again. For illiberal forces to lose so badly despite using every dirty trick in the book, massive state-sponsored propaganda, and buckets of Kremlin money … it’s a great, unexpected result. Unwinding 16 years of anti-democratic, anti-rule of law malfeasance is going to take time and will certainly encounter big bumps in the road, but I’m excited for Hungary to serve as a beacon for the forces of good in the world. Most vagy soha!
I have been traveling a ton for work lately, so I’m going to skip a couple of our normal sections and keep this issue brief. The team has lots of great education and policy projects underway, which I look forward to sharing in future issues. For now, though, let’s cut to the …
Happy Stat of the Week!
One of the biggest technological advances in human history is the rapid development of renewable energy tech. The efficiency of renewable energy continues to massively improve - in less than a generation, the cost of most forms of renewable energy has dropped below that of fossil fuels (these data are nearly two years old … renewable costs have dropped further since). The purpose of the Happy Stat is to focus on positive stuff, so I won’t comment on current White House energy policy.1
Source: IRENA report, 2024
Some Things That Intrigued Me
NYT data base. The journalist Ted Alcorn put together an amazing data base of New York Times coverage from 2000-2024. Check it out here. You could play with this for hours! The biggest issue, which isn’t surprising, is that terminology matters a lot for this sort of thing, yet terms also change over time. For example, see the data below on the number of articles on the U.S. Department of Education. Where there really no stories mentioning U.S. ED before 2008? Probably not. So you have to be careful in how you interpret the data. But wow, what a herculean task to pull these data together! Explore it and enjoy!
Try this! The researcher Ryota Kanai created this graphic during his doctoral work 20 years ago, and it has been making the rounds again on social media. Stare at the center of the image for a minute, and your brain starts to rearrange the entire graphic. Our brains don’t like disorder. Ryota has an entire site of similar illusions available here.
Some Things That Interested Me
Do art! Given that I’m writing this on National Art Day, I encourage you to do this little activity: Go look at something interesting for a few minutes. Really look at it and think about how you would draw or paint it. What colors would you use? How would you depict the shadows? How would you lay out the drawing/painting? Trust me, it’s a worthwhile activity! After a couple of minutes, you’ll start to figure it out. After five minutes, you’ll convince yourself that you can produce something better than Picasso. After 10 minutes, you’ll be ordering art supplies on Amazon.
Museums! I hit two art museums recently, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC and the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. The DC museum is excellent, highly recommended. There were lots of highlights, but I was especially drawn to this Elaine de Kooning, which is in the main stairwell. It is another piece in the tradition of “stairwell masterpieces,” such as O’Keefe’s Clouds at the Chicago Art Institute and Christina’s World and two Hoppers in the MOMA stairwell. It also reminded me a great deal of Flora Yukhnovich’s art, which regular readers know is a particular fascination of mine.
Contemporary art isn’t usually my thing, and the LA museum didn’t do much for me. But I accidentally took nearly 20 photos of the floor (I was trying to adjust the volume on my earbuds and kept pressing the wrong button). So here’s a selection of curated floor images, which feels just as artsy as some of those exhibits, tbh. Pretend it’s a commentary on our collective, existential frustration at being stuck in a political system we can’t seem to get out of, blah blah blah.
Jade Plant of the Month
One thing I love about SoCal is the number of jades growing in people’s yards. I went for a run one evening last week and came across this group of jades. A week or two ago, they were covered with flowers! Super dense, red edges, lots of new growth - these are happy jade bushes!
Where to Find Me & the Team
email: jplucker@jhu.edu
http://Amazon.com/author/jonathanplucker
www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanplucker
https://twitter.com/JonathanPlucker
https://education.jhu.edu/nrcae/
Footnotes, however, are not limited to happy stuff, so let’s be frank: Energy costs are sky high, yet the current administration has done everything in its power to kill renewable energy projects. Why?!? If renewables become the dominant energy sources, fossil fuel companies will still make tons of money - they’ve drastically increased plastic production to counter long-term decline in their oil profits. Solar and wind are much cheaper, much cleaner, allow us to be much more energy independent, and are increasingly reliable due to big improvements in battery tech … what’s the downside?