It seems to me like almost every single chart there is just a two item comparison. Why even use a chart in that case? The "2 largest distributors control 65% o

It seems to me like almost every single chart there is just a two item comparison. Why even use a chart in that case? The "2 largest distributors control 65% of the market" examples haven't really been thought through... If the point is to group companies B+C together and to group companies A+D+E+F together, why show them separated at all? The "African-Americans are more heavily represented" example is particularly egregious to me... My first though when looking at it: what do clocks have to do with this? Even knowing that they're pie charts and not clocks, it's far from the best way to illustrate the point. I'm not sure immediately off hand what would be better, but lots of little pie charts is very confusing, especially when the density varies. In this case, if all we're concerned with is the percentage of African-Americans, that's a single value that needs to be shown, whereas the pie chart unnecessarily shows two values. I think that kind of thing is the point of Tufte's books... If you don't care about some of the data that your graph is showing, why show it at all? It only distracts from the data you do care about. In the case of the two-item pie charts littering that page where you only care about one of the two percentages, a pie chart is a bad idea since it always includes the other data that you don't care about, thereby creating more visual clutter and making it harder to understand.