Schott's Op-Chart on the last five years

By David Pescovitz at 12:00 pm Friday, Sep 8

In yesterday's New York Times, Ben Schott, author of the excellent Scott's Original Miscellany and several other compendia of uncommon knowledge, created a masterful map/charticle of the last five years in news, politics, real estate prices, household earnings, George W. Bush's blood pressure, troop fatalities in Iraq, Nobel Prize winners, Homeland Security threat levels, top baby names, sports scores, and other bits of trivia and non-trivia. It's fun to think about the real and imaginary correlations. From the introduction to the "Op-Chart," titled "Five Years of Consequence":

It’s been nearly five years since 9/11, but it seems like a lifetime. Certainly, a lifetime’s worth of events for America and the world – elections and insurgencies, hurricanes and tsunamis, attacks and threats of attack – have unfolded with such speed that it can be hard to sort through, or even recall, everything of consequence. The chart below is an attempt, admittedly selective and incomplete, to survey the first five years of our post-9/11 world – a world that is certainly new, though not always brave.

Link (Thanks, Dale Dougherty!)