Salon | The Data Artist, page 2: "It could be, too, that the big publishers unfairly pegged Tufte as a bit of a crank. His writing sometimes exhibits a curled-lip testiness toward its targets, and he's unafraid to wield the knife of the polemical critic. He declares, for instance, that a ludicrously overwrought chart of 1970s college enrollment from American Education magazine 'may well be the worst graphic ever to find its way into print,' or that a bar-style listing in a small-aircraft flight guide is 'perhaps the worst index ever designed, a rare perfect failure.' "