The 2016 election cast Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's Dear Data: A Friendship in 52 Weeks of Data in an entirely new light. Dear Data came out in September as polling data started to harden around Hillary Clinton's chances for the presidency. It was reassuring to see der Horror-Clown, as German newspapers referred to the Republican candidate, didn't seem to have much of a chance at the presidency. Even the Trump campaign expected to lose. Among the casualties of the stunning result was our faith in big data in general and its predictive efficacy in particular. By contrast, Dear Data testifies to the storytelling power of data when it is personal and concrete. Lupi and Posavec used very small data sets--the stuff of daily experience--and ingenious data visualization to create what they call a "personal documentary." Unlike, say, your Fitbit, their data visualizations are beautiful. They're drawn by hand on postcards, which they mailed to each other weekly.
The first week Lupi and Posavec recorded how many times they checked the time. In "A Week of Clocks" Lupi, an Italian living in New York City, and the American-born Prosavec, who lives in London, tallied up how many times they looked at clocks. Lupi devised a symbolic system to capture why she checked the time. Prosevec drew radials to illustrate where she checked the time. Nothing earth-shattering was revealed in the exercise--really, what profound truths lurk in checking the time?--and the drawings are rather crude compared to what the authors will produce over the next 51 weeks. But their first subject hints at their larger project: to create a story of a self through data slices take over time. A narrative, after all, is change over time.
Like any good story, character is revealed Lupi's and Prosavec's data. With her tiny, precise symbols and keen attention to detail Lupi excels at examining intimate spaces. She inventories the closets in her Brooklyn apartment and compares the ratio of clothes she actually wears (a small share) to the clothes her boyfriend actually wears (every article in his closet). Early one morning, before any of her co-workers arrive for work, Lupi records the objects in every cubicle on her floor. Her co-workers must have been startled at the precision and stealth with which their workspaces were examined. We don't know for sure, but we find that Lupi sits only a few cubicles away from her boyfriend. How does that effect their relationship? Lupi doesn't say, letting the data speak for itself.
Lupi is the more introspective of the authors, yet Posavec is the more personally revealing. For Lupi everything is data and she plunges right into it. Posavec approaches her data more warily, commenting more readily on her data gathering and visualizations. She is frank about her struggles to expand her design vocabulary while matching Lupi's craftsmanship. Posavec loves Brixton and cultivates a wide circle of friends throughout London. Her sociability leads to occasional gaps in data collection--the authors refer to them as "data voids"--such as when she's been out drinking with friends. It turns out Posavec likes to swear, greeting "A Week of Swearing" with "F*ck Yeah!!" She relishes the chance to count birds and small mammals (but no rats) in "A week of Urban Wildlife." One of the most effective data visualizations appears late in the book and not as part of a weekly assignment. Posavec bluntly charts the course of an argument and reconciliation with her husband over the apparent loss of her cellphone, which she uses to track her data for Dear Data.
This is one of several instances in which Lupi and Posavec confront uncomfortable truths about themselves. During the "Week of Compliments" Lupi discovers the asymmetry between the compliments she receives and the ones she gives out. Lupi's boyfriend worries, not for the first time, for her sanity after she spends six hours obsessively drawing every door she's touched that week, tagged with characteristically whimsical attributes such as "So heavy!" "Boyfriend opened it for me," and "I locked it!" After Posavec finds the length of her to do list remains the same over a week, she consoles herself by admitting she "may as well stop worrying about getting everything done, because the list will never, ever, die." Posavec has to confess to (and draw) a data void that lasts an entire week when she forgets to track data for that week's assignment. Neither Lupi nor Posavec feels especially good about themselves at the end of "A Week of Envy."
Writing as someone who has been creating a lot of data visualizations lately--working, alas, in JavaScript and HTML rather than colored pencils and markers--I can appreciate how honest Lupi and Posavec are about their data. My experience has been corporate managers dislike, and won't believe, metrics that tell them what they don't want to hear. Also, big data is often quite narrow, nothing like the range of experience the authors track. At the same time, I'm awed by their inventiveness in rendering their lives in data. Over the year we see them grow as data visualizers and artists. Lupi's meticulous, symbolic style evolves to the point at which she seems more interested in her visualizations as an abstract work of art. At one point she looks to Kandinsky and Malevich for inspiration. More representational in her style, Posavec tinkers with her spirals to capture the way data moves, how it changes over time and through space. Her to-do list diagram is a good example. For another example see her map of walking through a crowd trying to smile at strangers--and growing grumpier with the effort.
"To draw is to remember," Lupi and Posavec remind us when their 52 weeks are up. They ask us to join in their project of tracking and visualizing our data. We create data all the time, now more than ever. If you have the Google Maps app on your cellphone Google is mapping your movements on a daily basis. It knows you took the train to work, drove to the grocery store or pool hall, and rode your bike to the park. Lupi and Posavec show us how to reclaim ownership of our own data--through drawings, of course--to make our data work for us rather than some corporation trying to sell us something. "It's not that hard" to they assure us. Perhaps not, but to draw it as beautifully and imaginatively as they do certainly is.
. The book's main source material is Scharf's extensive diaries, in which he scrupulously avoids recording anything of interest to anyone. A representative entry: "Very lively talk, Extra waiter (Midland). All carving done off the table. The hired flowers & new table linen looked very nice. To bed after 1 o’clock." This guy makes Willian Byrd look like Virginia Woolf. Desperate to get inside a man they called came to call "The Most Boring Man in the World," Warhol and Michie recreate a dinner party menu that Scharf may have consumed. They learn that Scharf had a nineteenth-century stomach capable of ingesting, in one sitting, servings of beef (in soup and roast forms), chicken, mutton, and fish, along with unknown quantities of chocolate profiteroles--without lapsing into a coma. 
appeared in English translation. The book was based on interviews she conducted with the mothers of dead soldiers.
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. The continent wasn't having its finest hour when she arrived. Europe was struggling with repeated debt crises, rising tensions over immigration, and decreasing influence abroad. Europe has clean air and water going for it, Aiyar finds, but its Sundays with closed shops are numbered. 
, Marlon James. This novel could also be called A Field Guide to Jamaican Cursing. Pretty much everyone in James’ long and uneven novel wants to kill somebody. The characters voice their threats and gripes in dense Jamaican dialect. I usually find dialect narratives to be tedious to read, but once you figure out the speech patterns and decode the colorful curse words (I liked “fuckery” in particular), the action really comes alive. James is as good as anyone writing now in creating distinct characters through voice. The first two-thirds of the novel, which relates the events surrounding the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976, is better than the last third, when a new set of somewhat lackluster characters is introduced and the novel loses its focus and energy. James’ novel is the most original I’ve read from a major publisher in a long time. 
, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Opinion about Knausgaard’s six-volume project is divided, to say the least. His story is a lot of the same thing, yet the novel works. Knausgaard is a sort of miserablist Proust. He remembers every beer he’s consumed since the age of twelve. There’s a theory--initiated by Sartre, I think--that says art advances by incorporating new kinds of experiences into itself. Knausgaard has us watch his hero wash dishes, walk to the drug store, and prepare instant coffee. It’s all weirdly fascinating, like watching a bedraggled Scandinavian family living in an Ikea store display. Knausgaard is overconfident about his skills as a writer, yet that’s precisely what makes the novel work. He believes in his material so deeply he's willing to stumble over his own awkward sentences to push it forward. My first thought after completing book one was, that was amazing. My second thought: Oh no, there are five more books of this stuff.
, George Eliot. I’ll dispense with the excuses about my I’m only now getting around to reading it all the way through. Suffice it to say I was too young to read it before. Virginia Woolf once said Middlemarch was the only novel ever written for adults, and she’s right. Eliot begins where ordinary novels of the period would end: with a betrothal. Dorothea Brooke is young and smart, but this is England in 1832, so her prospects for happiness are narrow. To make matters worse, she seems to court misery by marrying Edward Casaubon, the most tedious man in England. (The marriage was supposedly based on a couple Eliot knew.) The novel follows Dorothea and her fellow villagers as they try to extricate themselves from their own bad choices. It’s a great novel, maybe the greatest English novel of the century. The distance between our time and 1869, when Eliot started composing the novel, can be measured in her starchy tone and occasionally lugubrious sentence structure. She's not humorless, though, and the novel gains power as you get caught up in the power of Eliot’s depiction of sensitive, intelligent people trying to right their lives.
, Benoit Peeters. Does anyone still read Jacques Derrida? Probably not. Nevertheless, his central idea has become a verb in common parlance. Derrida would be horrified to hear people use the term “deconstruct” to apply to everything from a skyscraper to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He was famous (or notorious) for resisting all summaries and simplifications of his work. Reading his biography I could better understand why. Derrida was an extremely hard worker. His dense, difficult prose was the product of intense and nuanced intellectual labor. When he left his desk Derrida was a generous and, occasionally, insufferable man. By his own admission he was a poor father. He was a serial adulterer. He picked more fights with colleagues than he needed to. Like a lot of philosophers, he didn’t live the most eventful life. If you read Peeters’ biography, be prepared for a lot of conferences. Whatever your opinion of Derrida’s philosophy, he must be recognized as one of the keenest minds of the twentieth century. 
, Wes Anderson. The best film Anderson has made so far, it’s replete with off-the-wall period details like the coat check chit handed to a passenger after his cat was flung from the train. (Such Old World manners!) The plot isn’t worth summarizing; it’s really a vehicle for Anderson to link actions in amusing ways. Anderson keeps his customary whimsy at bay under the sobering influences of Stefan Zweig and Ernst Lubitsch. Ralph Fiennes is uncharacteristically sprightly as the busybody concierge, M. Gustave. The lobby boy Zero is exactly the kind of small canvas character Anderson excels in creating. With the exception of Bottle Rocket, the worlds of Anderson’s films are generally sealed off places where everyone speaks in the same punchy ironies. In this film you get the sense that just beyond the hills in Anderson’s imaginary Republic of Zubrowka some really awful things are happening. 
, to illustrate the conflict between an African-American woman and her psychiatrist. Read Ratik Asokan's 
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