Data
Journalist
Mona
Chalabi
Isn’t Sure
About Certainty
The Full-Time Job of Charting Feelings, Fault Lines, and Facts
- Interview: Haley Mlotek
- Photography: Heather Sten
Our hands can communicate a complete sentence. A pointed finger, a flat palm.
“Hands are everything, no?” said Mona Chalabi, the journalist, writer, and artist, when I visited her apartment in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. Even on an overcast January morning her living room-slash-office was bright and open, the walls covered with her works in progress. Chalabi uses many different mediums—she writes, paints, draws, as well as produces and hosts her own series of videos and podcasts. Her work appears in magazines, newspapers, and galleries, and she often posts originals on her social media accounts, so that followers can share freely. She covers many different topics, from science and health to justice and equality. While her work can reasonably be considered data journalism she is careful not to limit herself to the simple study of figures. Her sourcing is considered and measured, coming from a mix of trusted references and verified institutions, her reporting entirely committed to accuracy all the more so for recognizing that nothing in this world is beyond question. “The reason I use hand-drawn illustrations is to communicate the uncertainty of the data itself. They’re shaky and weird, and it’s to remind someone that a human has made a decision about these numbers,” she explained. “I want you to look at it and have a sense of how the world works.”
In the last few weeks, our hands have taken on different meanings, as many of us post and share videos and articles about the proper ways to wash them, hold them, keep them away from our loved ones to show how much we care. As the pandemic arrived in different countries, Chalabi posted a series of images to her Instagram account, using pens and paper to show the full extent of what is necessary to understand and prevent the spread of COVID-19. Confirmed cases, she wrote, are not as good an estimation in countries that weren’t doing extensive testing; she drew the common symptoms of the virus and translated them all, with the help of three hundred and forty four volunteers, into ten different languages. The information we have has been both a flood and a trickle, and separating fact from fear has been a consuming task for workers like Chalabi: people who understand the full responsibility of, first, getting the information right, and then getting that information to the people who need it most. In one post, she drew small portraits of those especially vulnerable to the disease—people with chronic illnesses, or who are incarcerated or undocumented—to remind us that there are people behind these statistics.
Raised in London, England by parents who were both doctors, Chalabi has always been fascinated by medicine and its powers. “We used to have the British Medical Journal arrive at our door,” she tells me, laughing a little at the memory, “and the front cover was always an extreme close-up of a wound, or a new rash.” As such there is no subject too gross and no taboo too strong to stop Chalabi from talking about it. Her work often covers the literal costs of living, whether she’s writing about the breakdown of jobs in New York City, the rising expenses of funerals in the United States, or the disparities between union and non-union wages. At other times, she focuses on the precise yet intangible qualities of our shared worlds: wage gaps between genders and races, which massive corporations pay zero dollars in federal taxes, the private companies that profit from detaining immigrants. She writes about bodies and their many surprising, hilarious, and gross indignities, whether it’s sunburns, sex, or pantyhose sales.
The contemporary field of data journalism often feels like an accidental study in compromise. To scan the headlines is to understand that while the qualitative elements of life are in steep decline, at least we know the exact quantities of that decline. Pundits and journalists repeat the same messages: everything is bad, so let’s focus our attention on counting and sorting all those bad things. Chalabi, with a skepticism well-suited to her chosen line of work, sees things differently. “People forget that journalists are as distrusted as politicians,” she says, a result of opaque methodologies and undeclared biases. Other prominent data journalists will often claim to know the truth of the situation to a decimal point, but Chalabi thinks such conviction can only be a self-serving lie. “It makes them people in the know, people who possess an objective truth that we have to go to them or that we can only aspire to.” For herself, she wants to offer a new way of showing rather than telling. Her work is an ongoing attempt to find the best display for the curious waves that ripple through our worlds. In everything she does, Chalabi is looking close, and asking people to do the same. So much of her work is about distance—the way we can become isolated from each other and even ourselves if we don’t see what is happening right in front of our faces.
That’s not to say Chalabi is a proselytizer for data (far from it). Instead, she is a collector of experiences, no matter how strange or common; an investigator of averages and an artist of percentages. Everything could (will) be different tomorrow, but Chalabi will be there when that change happens, marking it with honesty, intelligence, and style. In the interview below, we spoke about her favorite topics which are, in no particular order: the body, the community, and the world.
Haley Mlotek
Mona Chalabi
I wanted to start by talking about what you were like as a kid. Were you the kind of child who was always telling the other kids the truth?
I remember finding out how sex worked quite early on, and I was like let me tell you... It really does give you traction on the playground.
Baby’s first power play. Were you always interested in writing and drawing?
Yes and no. My sister found some of my stuff recently, from when I was really young, and she was like, this looks exactly like your work now.
There are some themes in your work that appear again and again, familiar topics and mediums. What ideas do you keep returning to, and how do you choose the best way to represent them?
I always pick the topic and then the medium. Characters and an emotional link to the topic matters a lot. Color, and something that’s aesthetically pleasing, matters as well. A good graph is one you can see yourself in; not all the time, but sometimes. It’s honest about its limitations. It shows uncertainty, human bias, and is pretty to look at. Maybe a good graph means telling the truth while also being honest about which truths you can tell.
I think race and ethnicity are major themes, obviously, and part of that is because my identity has shifted so radically. Being Arab is a fucking weird place to be. I’m not in the statistics, generally speaking. Gender, again obviously; I was raised by a super feminist mom whose whole job as a gynecologist was about women’s health. Wealth disparities are huge for me—economic and social justice. Taboo subjects, like shit and piss and sex, probably because I was raised by two doctors who were very into bodily fluids.
Your mother is another constant presence in your work—you reference how influential her career as a gynecologist was in your writing, and you featured her in episodes of Vagina Dispatches. What has it been like to negotiate, in private, sharing these conversations in public?
I think people hear or read some of the things I’ve done, like when I interviewed her about a miscarriage for my podcast Strange Bird, and think we’re so close. We’ve had a really, really difficult relationship. In the process of making Vagina Dispatches, there was a readily available gynecologist on hand, which meant I could pick up the phone and speak to her in a way that I can’t very often. So many of us do that with our relatives: we’re looking for an intermediate language. It makes a story stronger when you say I’m not just reporting on this thing—I’ve lived this thing. But you sacrifice a lot in doing that. I talk to my mother about my work because I love her, and it’s a language we can share.
Sometimes it’s wrong to think of small talk as being a lesser form of conversation. There’s nothing small about finding common ground.
It almost gives us permission. There have been times when I’ve tentatively asked things I think might be upsetting, and she’ll tentatively answer and then retreat. But even that little exchange wouldn’t have happened without the groundwork of that small talk. Speaking about anything is the first step to understanding.
It seems like even in our most private moments we’re looking for someone else who can look at it and say that’s real or that happened as a way of confirming that it matters.
There’s a strange connection between prevalence and feeling special. Having an experience that feels true and painful, and just because something is prevalent…knowing that a million other people are going through what you’re going through is a funny conclusion of data journalism. I went through some things when I was younger, and since then I’ve wondered whether I have a right to my sadness. Numbers could provide some comfort, but often they don’t.
There’s such an interesting parallel between data and astrology. People are desperate for both of them right now, and a lot of people who are into data might be disparaging of astrology, and vice versa. I think both of them are massive simplifications of the world that people seek comfort in and can potentially do harm. I worry a lot about that quality: how am I making the world a worse place by telling you these facts? That’s why I don’t fuck with astrology. I don’t want someone to narrate me to me. Maybe there are lots of people who like both! It can’t be that much of a separate world.
I’ve always thought astrology was a form of socially sanctioned narcissism. It’s an acceptable way to say let’s just talk about me now. I wonder if the overlap with data is that they’re both an arena where people can feel seen.
I was just about to use those exact words: people want to be seen. I think that’s absolutely true. There’s also the feeling that your voice isn’t enough. Now you’ve got a piece of evidence you can whack down to be like, I’m a Scorpio.
I wanted to talk about the history of data journalism, and specifically the original artworks you contributed to an exhibition currently on view at London’s House of Illustration called “W.E.B. DuBois: Charting Black Lives,” about how infographics and statistical work were a critical part of his research and writing.
He’s such an inspiration to me. The work he did came out in 1900, and he was trying to change the world by showing how systems work. Because so much data gathering makes assumptions about the way the world is, very often it reinforces the way the world is. Really good data visualization doesn’t just show outcomes, it shows who benefits from these systems, and who loses. Dubois’ work revealed the system, and that’s really hard. It’s hard to do with words in a compelling way, it’s hard to do with visuals, and that’s why these systems are so nefarious. They benefit from being invisible. I think a lot of data journalists today are producing really good work, and movements like Occupy Wall Street show how economic systems operate in a way that’s almost godly. You can’t see the way God works, and you can’t see the way capitalism works either, right? It’s just everything and unavoidable. Not that I really believe in God.
Do you feel like that’s a quality your work has, that you’re always pointing your finger towards what is unseen?
I want to inform people so they can make the best decisions about their lives. As women, as people of color, we’re constantly gaslighting ourselves. The speed of communication is so essential before you lose someone. The world is like, this isn’t a real issue. And when data shows it’s a real fact, that’s very reassuring. It’s the forecasting I think is scary.
Speaking of…How do you feel about election forecasting?
Deeply, deeply, deeply negative. I think data used to predict the future is potentially dangerous, and when it comes to predicting the future of a democracy or influencing fair electoral outcomes—that’s very, very worrying to me. The way we put information out into the world affects people. And we can think we’re being humble, as journalists, when we say that it’s not having any impact, but actually it’s irresponsible. The calculations people make from journalism like that, polls and predictions, filters into a public consciousness.
You call it a calculation, and that’s what it is, but I don’t know if most people consider that thinking as math.
It’s ok to be skeptical of data and polls, but people have a fearful relationship with maths and numbers. Skepticism is good, but fear less so.
Even if the forecasts are bad, I think that sometimes they might provide some reverse comfort; the chance to steel myself for the worst possible outcomes. Like even when you’re figuring out whether or not to break up with your partner, you’re doing the maths on whether or not you’re going to meet someone better. Unfortunately I can’t give you probabilities on shit like that.
It really comes back to this idea of being seen. People almost want an invitation. After the Vagina Dispatches, a lot of women I knew were telling me very vulnerable things that had happened to them because they trusted that, because of my work, I wouldn’t regard them as bizarre or crazy or gross. And I can honestly say I didn’t. There’s a high bar for grossing me out.
Haley Mlotek is a writer, editor, and organizer living in Brooklyn. She is the co-chair of the Freelance Solidarity Project, a distinct division for freelance digital media workers within the National Writers Union. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Hazlitt, among others. She is currently working on a book about romance and divorce.
- Interview: Haley Mlotek
- Photography: Heather Sten
- Photography Assistant: Justin Wee
- Hair and Makeup: Rachael Ghorbani using YSL Beauty
- Date: March 27, 2020
