Listen, I’m as deep a Tufte groupie as I think you can get, but this felt inessential. This is a book ostensibly about “pictures of verbs” and it feels more like a sidequest compared to his previous two books. There are good iterations on what feel like strawmen; there are some good outlying principles for visualizations that you have probably already internalized from his previous writing; there are many many cool visualizations and things to gawk at if not learn from. You will probably own this as a result of buying the Tufte box set (and I don’t blame you), but I can’t recommend reading this for any other reason beyond “you want to spend two hours looking at some coo

★★★

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I'm Justin Duke — a software engineer, writer, and founder. I currently work as the CEO of Buttondown, the best way to start and grow your newsletter, and as a partner at Third South Capital.

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