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Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!

In this week’s newsletter we have charts on kids’ TV shows, how the US oil embargo is hitting Cuba, how people feel about dating, how the fuel crisis has changed where Australia gets its fuel from, and what the New York subway would sound like if it was a jazz band (wait, what?!).

But first … A Guardian investigation into skincare content on TikTok has found hundreds of videos presented by children

No charts in this one, but an important investigation from our UK colleagues – they analysed a sample of 7,605 videos on the social media platform and found at least 400 TikTok videos featured routines or advice presented by children believed to be under 13.

Dermatologists have said that children do not need multi-step skincare routines and the trend is fuelling anxiety about appearance at ever younger ages. One dermatologist said she was increasingly “reassuring children that what parents see as blemishes are simply normal skin”. You can read the full investigation here.

Elsewhere on the Guardian, our colleagues made a visual guide to US bases in the UK. And Greg Jericho made a bunch of housing charts, including one appearing to show no huge change in housing construction since the capital gains discount was introduced.

Five charts from the fortnight

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1. Cuba runs on oil, and the oil is running out

This is a fantastic piece by the Reuters team outlining the effect of the US blockade on oil being transported to Cuba. Cuba has previously relied on oil imports from Venezuela and Mexico for providing electricity in the country, but following the US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro shipments from Venezuela have ceased.

The star of the piece is not the excellent streamgraph chart pictured here, but the clever transition Reuters makes in the feature when explaining the consequences of the blockade, which we won’t spoil here.

The New York Times also produced this piece in March, which visualises the impact of the blockade on energy usage by showing the change in night-time light intensity.

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2. Where Australia is getting its fuel

From one fuel chart to another – the ABC in Australia has this explainer on how the US and Israel war on Iran has changed the supply of fuel to Australia.

Essentially, Australia has had to change the makeup of countries providing refined oil products – petrol, diesel and jet fuel – locking in supply from Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia as other countries hold back fuel exports.

The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has been personally visiting countries in the region to discuss the fuel crisis and secure trading agreements.

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3. Why Cocomelon is the devil How kids’ TV shows are designed to appeal to children

If you’re a parent of a certain age then the analysis in this feature will come as no surprise. The team from the Straits Times has crunched the data on 200 children’s shows on YouTube to look at how these shows use pacing and colour, and how this use may create content that might be extra-stimulating for kids.

There’s no smoking gun here that clearly shows certain shows are terrible for your kids, but there is a great section on how different TV shows can be educational, and in what way.

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4. The Faustian pact that kept the ‘third place’ alive

Poker machines aka pokies aka slot machines aka fruit machines. Whatever you call them, the regulation of these gambling machines has been handled differently in different countries, and social scientist Lauren Leek has this interesting blog post comparing the regulation of the machines in Australia and the UK, and how this has affected the amount of money lost to gambling and where.

The piece has quite a few interesting techniques and good charts, and also includes this map which brings together poker machine losses and Leek’s vulnerability index, which is interesting to explore.

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5. Modern dating is terrible

It’s another entry from the Straits Times! We don’t know what is going on in Singapore but the Straits Times team have been smashing it recently. This feature takes a hard look at how dating works (or doesn’t) in the modern age based on a survey of 1,000 people. Apparently about half of the respondents described Singapore’s dating scene as “bleak”.

We really loved the treatment of the data here, using humanising illustrations with the visual metaphor of windows in a high-rise apartment block.

Bookmarks

• Clean energy generation exceeded rise in global electricity demand in 2025

• River trees

• The quiet disappearance of Australia’s rainfall observation network

• Visualising how annoying traffic noise really is

• How the giant D.C. arch would compare to others across the world ($)

• Women in their 20s may not be having babies, but by 45 most probably will ($)

Off the Charts

What happens when you take live train location data and convert it into instruments from a jazz band? Train jazz!

Developer Joshua Wolk has produced this lovely visualisation and sonification of New York subway data, which takes the movement of trains and assigns the data to different instruments, such as double bass, trumpet, guitar and so on. Together they produce a meandering, free-form jazz song.

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