Alberto Cairo

@albertocairo.com

11360 Followers 1302 Following

Designer, journalist, and professor. Author of 'The Art of Insight' (2023) 'How Charts Lie' (2019), 'The Truthful Art' (2016), and 'The Functional Art' (2012). NEW PROJECT: https://openvisualizationacademy.org/

A quote from the Washington Post Article: "Computer scientists have known since the 1950s that computer programs can, in principle, emulate any aspect of human thought. This is because the digital calculations inside a computer can emulate the inputs and outputs of the neurons in a human brain."

A photo of the Pope next to the cover of 'Magnifica Humanitas'

My lovely French Bulldog looking at me

'Chart' book cover

A screenshot of the visualization. It looks like sound waves

Map of the Baltic style, drawn in a style that resembles historical maps from the time

The photo shows 3D-printed busts of Albert Camus, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche

Screenshot of a news story saying that "The Supreme Court on Tuesday found that a Colorado law banning conversion therapy for gay and transgender minors likely violates free speech, the latest in a string of decisions by the high court rolling back protections for LGBTQ+ people and expanding the rights of the religious."

Signs

Signs

Principled Design: A Philosophy of Chart Making

A photo showcasing two figures, a 3D printed portrait of Albert Camus and the dog-creature from the movie The Thing, by John Carpenter

From the story:

For Tufte, the answer is uncompromising: “Maximize signal/content. No toy graphics.” His philosophy, developed over decades and multiple influential books, argues that credibility emerges from visual discipline. Graphics should approach “the pixel resolution of typography”—dense, restrained, stripped of decoration.

“Commercial designers have it wrong,” Tufte wrote in response to our questions. “High-resolution graphics usually have more clarity and more information.” In his view, the profusion of “story-telling” in data visualization is “intellectually impoverished,” failing to distinguish between truth and fiction the way advertising does.

It’s a philosophy rooted in deep skepticism of commercial media. Tufte points to advertising-saturated platforms as actively harmful to truth. By contrast, he praises large language models as “ad-free tools that try for truth,” describing them as vindication of his decades-long argument for concentration and clarity over entertainment.

Substacker Stephan Geering wrote "Challenge for those who are very confident that Claude isn't conscious: Explain how human consciousness works."

Screenshot of Gurman Bhatia's course

Abstract collage of images extracted from Rodolfo's course about Figma

Quote: "In recent years, I have grown increasingly concerned that public health has become too siloed, too dogmatic and too uncomfortable communicating uncertainty. I have seen colleagues on all sides digging in, becoming less willing to engage across disagreement or to acknowledge limits and trade-offs. That retreat may feel protective, but it ultimately undermines trust, both within science and with the public we serve."

Screenshot of the OVA website, showing all courses

A CNN story with the title: "South Carolina measles outbreak is largest in US since measles was declared eliminated". The story includes a line graph showing cumulative cases of measles in the U.S. In 2023 and 2024, the lines are flat. The line for 2025 shows a steady increase, adding up to a total of 2,253 cases. The line for 2026, which counts only the first 28 days of January, is almost vertical: More than 500 cases in just one month

Photos of four people murdered by ICE in the past few months (Silverio Villegas, Keith Porter, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti) and a visualization by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Two pie charts compare the number of homeland security federal agents deployed in the city (3,000 personnel) to the the Twin Cities metro police forces (2,482 personnel)

A Fortune headline that reads: "Scott Galloway got mostly B’s and C’s in high school, never studied for the SAT, and had to try twice to get into UCLA. Now he’s worth $150 million"

A scatter plot of 2000 voters's ideological leanings. X axis is economic policy and Y axis is social policy. There's correlation between those two axis, but there are more center-left and left voters than center-right

Screenshot of the website, showing a hand interacting with a data visualization on a touchscreen

Screenshot of the symposium's website. It shows a hand interacting with a touch screen, and buttons to register and to see the agenda

"Do Dumb Ideas Ever Die?" by Bret Stephens

Screenshot of the website, showing the dates (December 11-12) and the place (Miami)

A world map that illustrates the article

The vilest hypocrites, urged on by that same fury which they call zeal for God’s law, have everywhere prosecuted men whose blameless character and distinguished qualities have excited the hostility of the masses, publicly denouncing their beliefs and inflaming the savage crowd’s anger against them. And this shameless license, sheltering under the cloak of religion, is not easy to suppress. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise

Two black-and-white infographics explaining sailing and global warming, respectively

Screenshot of the website with photos of the three keynotes

Screenshot of the C+J website, including the dates, December 11 and 12, and the two keynotes, Attila Batorfy and Homa Hosseinmardi

Title and subtitle form a New York Times story: Trump Wants Universities to Show Him the Money, or No Deal
President Trump has personally stipulated that hefty financial penalties be part of agreements his administration is negotiating with the elite universities. Critics call it extortion.

A Washington Post headline: Trump readies federal moves on D.C. crime, takes over D.C. police

A screenshot of the conference website. It shows a person interacting with a data visualization

Black Sabbath t-shirt

Cover of the book. It shows a bird's nest with a few broken eggs

A Washington Post op-ed with the title 'To save themselves, universities must cultivate civic friendship'

Map of the galaxy

Photo of the book cover

The slide lists six values (joy, attention, truthfulness, care, exemplarity, community) each connected to a well-known philosopher, such as Albert Camus, Simon Weil, or Michel Foucault.

Structure of the layers of a visualization

A slide that says "What the "AI" hype reminds me of. Showing images of Microsoft's Clippy, a sci fi image about Big Data, and an explanation of what MOOCs are (Massive Open Online Courses)

Cover of the 'Data visualization handbook'

A screenshot of a large gallery of charts made with R

"It is a landscape without softness, lacking even the rudiments of lyrical pleasure: a landscape of deprivation where every stone is a sharp, weighty noun."

The image shows a Google search for "Queen Amygdala", and Google corrects it to Queen Amidala, of Star Wars fame. The joke is that Michael Hobbes, in the most recent episode of the If Books Could Kill podcast, pronounced both words similarly, and referenced the Star Wars character

A screenshot of the header of Pamela Paul's last column ("My Farewell Column") at The New York Times

A book about the Vienna Circle titled 'Exact Thinking in Demented Times'

A swastikar (aka Tesla cybertruck) wrapped in the U.S flag to announce the services of "Abogado Sincero" (a last name, although it translates as "Sincere attorney")

Cover of Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer (English and Spanish editions) and a screenshot of The Pudding’s Abortion Mazes visual essay

A badly designed pie chart showing the sales of a company month by month. This isn't an appropriate choice for this, as the pie chart makes it nearly impossible to compare months to each other (pie charts are fine for other purposes!)