Wonklife

Wednesday night, a white man walked into a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine parishioners. Today, a Confederate flag is flying on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia — as it does every day. While the flags on top of the statehouse itself are flying at half-mast, the Confederate flag (displayed at a Civil War memorial) is flying at full mast.

The cloudiest places on Earth, in one beautiful map.

Dark blue areas see very little cloud cover. White areas are cloudy almost all the time.

The riots in Baltimore that started after Freddie Gray’s funeral Monday, April 27, have produced dramatic, violent images: burning cars and buildings, smashed windows, and young protestors throwing bricks and rocks at the police.

But the aftermath of the riots has also provided powerful photos of a community pulling together: dozens of people showing up to a burned CVS as Tuesday morning dawned, children home from school helping sweep the streets, volunteers helping feed and entertain kids while school is canceled, and men trying to keep order and ensure the demonstrations are peaceful.

The growth of partisan polarization has transformed US politics in recent decades, and the effects are especially visible in Congress. Now a new paper in PLOS One (and flagged byWonkblog’s Chris Ingraham) demonstrates this transformation in a particularly cool way.

Six researchers — Clio Andris, David Lee, Marcus Hamilton, Mauro Martino, Christian Gunning, and John Armistead Selden — have created a visualization of how likely the House of Representatives’ Democrats (in blue) and Republicans (in red) are to vote with their own party, or to cross party lines. The change over the past six decades is remarkable.