Bush years map

This graphic appeared in the January/February 2009 online edition of the Atlantic Monthly. The graphic accompanied a story titled Then and now by Timothy Lavin on how the United States has changed in the nine years since George W. Bush's election. The map does a nice job conjuring up the notion of the United States, by using the geographic shape of the U. S. to frame the data. Unfortunately, the positioning of information is unrelated to place. Also, I get a vague sense that the map wants to be a cartogram, but the only relational data presented is inside the individual frames and these are simply graphic illustrations.

There are a couple of, perhaps, coincidental geographic placements. A pig sits right around North Carolina and of course that state is know for is pig and hog farming and BBQ. There is a boat in Florida as well as a graphic illustrating growth in home ownership, appropriate given the housing boom in Florida. On the disturbing side is a graphic around New York illustrating yearly paper use that looks a lot like the World Trade Center Towers.