Robert Krulwich describes the End-of-the-Year Danger Zone:
Take a look at this graph. Take a very close look if you have recently fallen in love. This is David McCandless and Lee Byron’s “Peak Break-Up Times” calendar, where they chart the times of year when couples tend to call it quits. We are entering the End-of-the-Year Danger Zone.
He asks us to see things differently:
McCandless and Byron searched through public Facebook records looking for the keywords “break up” or “broken up,” then arranged the change of status updates on a calendar so you can see when couples tend to dissolve. If you turn this graph upside down you will see that August and September are the “We’re Together Peak” months. After that, the trouble begins.
Over at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal (illustrated by none other than Frank Chimero) flags a warning related to online dating:
Statistically likely does not mean correct, or just, or fair. Google-generated kadosh is meretricious, offering a desiccated kind of choice. It’s when people deviate from what we predict they’ll do that they prove they are individuals, set apart from all others of the human type.
I still might avoid the holidays.
