Things we explored and loved this week

It’s a striking thing, watching every burst of collective outrage sparkle across a world map. But what's even more striking about Foreign Policy's animation of every protest since 1979 is how much these actions clearly proliferate at the end of the 2000s, with the rise of social media.

There's been nonstop coverage of the Rim Fire, but National Geographic focused in on an underreported slice of the action: the inmates battling the blaze.

"In return for their service, inmates are allowed to stay at a camp where they live in barracks and receive generous pay by prison standards—$1 an hour fighting fires and $1.35 to $2.65 per day at other times," the magazine reported. "Many also get up to two days cut from their sentence for every day in camp … After their release, some of the men have gone on to become firefighters in the civilian world."

Yes, the United States spies on more people's Facebook accounts than any other country. But not if you take into account how big the country is. Based on Facebook's first Global Government Requests Report, Mother Jones looked at how many requests a government made to Facebook for data, divided by the number of Facebook users in the country, and found that Italy and Germany are actually snoopier than the U.S. But it's the winner that will really surprise you. 

Until now, we only knew the total of the government’s top-secret “black budget,” not how the funds were divvied up. But former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a breakdown of the $52.6 billion to the Washington Post, which transformed it into an elegant series of interactive charts. It's revealed that the CIA gets the largest chunk of change, the government spends $4.3 billion goes to cyber operations, plus many more intriguing details.

This is the first ever map, according to Wired, to show the racial distribution of every citizen in the country. Made by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia’s Weldon cooper Center for Public Service, the maps show what cities are still extraordinarily segregated, and which are just run of the milll segregated. (Detroit pictured.)