The Paradox in the Admissions Office

The brief

Tell an analytical story with real, verified data.

The idea

One chart cannot explain Simpson's paradox, but seven consecutive ones can. The same bars rebuild themselves as you read, until the headline that looked like discrimination turns out to be about which door people knocked on.

Decisions

• Real published data, cited, in a full table at the foot of the page.
• The figure stays still while the text moves, so the eye tracks changes in one place.
• Blue and magenta come from the validated palette, and each bar also has labels.
• It ends on the honest limit: the data cannot say why the choices differed.

How it came together

1. Used the six-department table from Bickel, Hammel and O'Connell, Science, 1975.
2. Wrote the argument as seven steps, each with one change to the picture.
3. Separated overlapping bubbles and widened the chart after review.

How it works

Each scroll step redraws one SVG from the same dataset, triggered by IntersectionObserver.