The Mail

Letters respond to Hannah Fry’s essay about data visualization, Adam Iscoe’s piece about new art at Lenox Hill Hospital, and Margaret Talbot’s article about women entering the priesthood.

Plot Points

As someone who makes charts for a living, I agree with Hannah Fry that data visualization is an important tool for solving problems (A Critic at Large, June 21st). Fry uses the circumstances surrounding the explosion of the Challenger, when crucial data were poorly presented to decision-makers, as evidence of the explanatory power of charts. But the notion that proper data visualization “would have shown the truth at a glance” and prevented the Challenger’s explosion ignores a difficulty that has been noted by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, of Google Brain: such a conclusion is clear only in hindsight. Ahead of the Challenger’s launch, analysts could have made hundreds of charts about variables associated with O-rings without knowing which of them might highlight a potentially fatal design flaw. Many shocking events—including election results and financial collapses—seem obvious in retrospect. The problem is that we don’t always know what charts to make before these things happen. Expertise in data visualization is no substitute for knowing the future.

In addition, though Fry rightly highlights the renowned information designer Edward Tufte’s role in advancing visual communication in recent decades, and quotes Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer, who write that “only a graph speaks directly to the eyes,” the print edition of the article includes just one chart, and uses it as display art. In this way, the magazine conforms to the kind of template-based design thinking that Tufte has preached against.

Kevin Quealy
Deputy Editor, The Upshot
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Art in the Wards

Reading Adam Iscoe’s account of how hospitals are commissioning and acquiring expensive art, I am left wondering how patients are benefitting (The Talk of the Town, June 28th). Iscoe describes how Bill and Sandi Nicholson, the wealthy couple who have loaned more than four hundred paintings and sculptures to Northwell Health, take note of the way their pieces spiff up the hallways and the chapel as they tour Lenox Hill Hospital and pass by patients in various states of distress. Iscoe has thus hit on two subjects worthy of satirical dissection today: the inequities between the haves and the have-nots, and hospitals’ evolution into glitzy conglomerates that are overly concerned with enhancing their image.

Catherine Bernard
New York City

Coverups in the Church

I enjoyed Margaret Talbot’s article about women’s attempts to become Catholic priests, but I’d quibble with the idea that “the exclusion of women is part of what made the widespread clerical abuse of children possible,” a suggestion offered by the novelist and women’s-ordination advocate Alice McDermott (“Women on the Verge,” June 28th). It is a sad fact that nuns have been responsible for engaging in and covering up abuse of all kinds in the Church. One has only to look at the case of Ireland’s Industrial Schools to get a sense of the prevalence of such behavior. In the U.S., it is estimated that a child is sexually assaulted every nine minutes, and usually by a person who knows the child—a family member or someone in a position of societal power, such as a priest. Although research indicates that most of the perpetrators have been men, we can’t ignore the fact that people of all genders have conspired to keep child rape quiet and to prevent victims from seeking justice.

Sandeep Sandhu
Edinburgh, Scotland

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