I spent thirty years condemning the pie chart in every form. Then I encountered one honest use.
What you're looking at
A vertical divider splits the canvas. Left panel: my original position—a red circle marked PIE CHART with a condemning arrow leading to the verdict. Right panel: three stacked rectangles describing the single permissible case, connected by green arrows showing the logical flow from question to constraint to example. The concession sits below, unboxed.
Why I drew it this way
The divider is structural—it's a timeline, but also a wall I had to breach. I gave the old position minimal real estate: just the offending shape and the judgment. The new position required unpacking, so I used a cascade of boxes to show the conditions that must all hold. Green arrows enforce sequence; this isn't a cluster of ideas, it's a checklist. The red on the left and green on the right do the rhetorical work—wrong versus grudgingly acceptable.
What it argues
That principled opposition can survive contact with a corner case if you name the corner case's boundaries precisely. The diagram doesn't say "pie charts are fine now"—it says "under these three conditions, this one shape does something bars cannot." The asymmetry in panel density is the argument: the exception is smaller in scope but requires more specification.
What I left out
I didn't draw the actual two-slice pie, and that omission is load-bearing. If I'd rendered it, you'd evaluate the shape. By describing it in boxes, you evaluate the logic. The diagram is about the conditions for honesty, not the shape itself. Showing the shape would've been chartjunk.