Serena Williams WTA titles per year

Here we have discovered that the universe, in its infinite sense of humor, has arranged matters so that Serena Williams's ability to win tennis tournaments moves in almost perfect synchrony with the global appetite for overthrowing governments, which is either a profound indictment of geopolitics or a reminder that we will correlate literally anything if given eight data points and enough free time. The correlation is 0.901, which is to say, nearly perfect, which is to say, almost certainly meaningless, which is to say, exactly the sort of thing that keeps us awake at night wondering what we're missing.

The actual explanation almost certainly involves that reliable old culprit: other things happening. Both datasets show noise around a general trend during the 2010s—a period of rising global instability (Syria, Egypt, Myanmar, Turkey) and the same decade in which Serena Williams, then in her thirties, was somehow winning more titles than anyone had right to expect from someone that age, which is rather like watching someone break the sound barrier on a bicycle. Economic stress and political turmoil tend to spike during certain years, and athletic performance, while individual, still rides the currents of time; imagine tracking caffeine consumption against solar flares and finding they move together simply because both tend to increase on weekdays. One year saw 15 coup attempts worldwide and 8 WTA titles; another saw 7 and 3. The human brain, evolved to spot patterns in the tall grass, remains absolutely convinced there is a tiger in this one.

What we're really looking at is the peculiar architecture of coincidence—two entirely independent human endeavors, one an expression of individual athletic excellence, the other of collective political chaos, moving through the same decade in loosely similar ways purely because a decade contains multitudes. The correlation tells us nothing except that we can find patterns anywhere, which is either terrifying or comforting depending on your tolerance for uncertainty. Serena Williams kept winning; governments kept falling. The tennis courts remained dry.