There’s a new study published by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism detailing a pretty serious threat by the forces of Stupid. The report finds that since many newspapers are now owned by hedge funds and other outside corporate groups (with no particular sense of civic responsibility);

Here’s a great idea for newspapers everywhere: Turn fact-checking into a fun animated GIF. It’s kind of a face-palm, why-isn’t-this-happening-everywhere moment, actually. And that’s why it’s a great idea – because of it’s surprising simplicity. Animated GIFs tend to get more engagement in social media You want as many people

The good people at xkcd had some viral success earlier this week with a cartoon graph of human history and the acceleration of climate change relative to the last 22,000 years. I don’t know how long the graph has actually been around, but it definitely popped up in a couple places

This is the second video game I’ve stumbled across in the past few months that used interactivity to create a visceral emotional response to a contemporary event. There’s this moment of recognition as you’re playing where everything that’s wrong with the situation becomes more real. It’s persuasive, and it’s something

It seems like once every few months John Oliver just blows my mind. This made the rounds in the jouralism social media in a major way when it came out — probably because it cuts right down to the bone for a lot of folks who work at (or used

I stumbled across a juicy morsel about a video game called Easy Level Life that was featured on Kill Screen and Okayplayer recently. It’s an interesting piece of information translation, taking a commonly asked question (mostly by white people who’ve never had a negative experience with the police): “What did they

Data Viz O.G. There’s a really interesting article over on Atlas Obscura about one bonnie Scot named William Playfair, who began making illustrated charts and graphs in the late-18th century — one of the early (or earliest) practitioners of modern data visualization). Unfortunately he lived at a time when the

Brave new world There is very little doubt in my mind that the next front in the War on Stupid will play out across a field of algorithms. It already is to an increasing degree, as people discover endless mountains of content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. There’s so much

Something for the reading list, if you’re interested in infographics and/or visual information design. Alberto Cairo has a new book called “The Truthful Art: Data, Charts and Maps for Communication.” (grab a copy on Amazon, or your fav bookseller) You can also read an excerpt from the book over at

Last year, the War on Stupid talked about how John Oliver was a model for high-quality information translation practices. He has the ability to take complex issues like the prison-industrial complex or net neutrality and repackage into something more readily accessible for laypeople. Earlier in February, communications shop Blue Engine Media dropped a similar read, but focused

Adam Mckay’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book of (nearly) the same title is a perfect embodiment of the ideas we’ve been espousing here at The War on Stupid for several years now: The way to help people acheive a deeper understanding of complex issues is to serve the explanation with a

The popular media must not be doing a very good job because I set this news alert up more than a year ago and I still haven’t gotten anything delivered to my inbox. And then people wonder why political discourse has devolved and civility has declined. For American Democracy to

The Western U.S. is being hit with droughts across several ranges of time. There’s longer-term dryness from Nevada and Arizona that causes higher levels of dust to melt snowpack in the Rockies faster than normal. Colorado has too much water in some places, after nearly a decade of too little

Here’s a great example of how to make government less stupid (because that behemoth of bureaucracy couldn’t be more broken at this point, at least at the federal level). Obama has recruited a startup operation, now 140 people strong and including former Silicon Valley wiz-kids in its ranks, in order to reimagine how

The Columbia Journalism Review makes a compelling case that we’re living in a Golden Age of documentaries and that filmmaking will soon eclipse longform journalism as a primary means of conveying complex information. “What makes documentary film a better truth-delivery system than print? The most effective documentaries combine advocacy with immediacy. Film

Have you ever wondered to yourself what differentiated a Cleveland-style hotdog from the average Chilean’s preferred presentation? Breathe a sigh of relief because awkward moments when you can’t remember 40 cultural variations on sausage-style cased meats are a thing of the past. The good people at Food Republic have created this

A few years ago, someone realized that the internet and lists go together like milk and Oreos. The list is an amazing medium for transmitting text in the harried digital environment of the web. It’s small chunks (easy to understandvisually and quick to read) that are prioritized in order of