Hey, I think something’s wrong with this graph! Free copy of Regression and Other Stories to the first commenter who comes up with a plausible innocent explanation of this one.

Paul Alper points us to this column by Dana Milbank discussing the above graph from Georgia’s Department of Public Health: Ok, the comb-style bar graph is, as always, a bad idea, as it multiplexes two dimensions (county and time) on a single x-axis. The graph should be a lineplot, with one line per county, and …