“Who would not pity the poet who has to write and make his rhymes about some bold Sir Francis Drake’s brave journey round the tetrahedron?”
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The semi-mythical Greek is not only the father of the epic poem, but also of geography
The Zeno Brothers invented a bunch of islands north of Scotland that turned out to have remarkable staying power on maps
Is the Land of Oz located on a retrograde planet?
n In September 1578, while sailing near Greenland’s southernmost point at Cape Farewell, captain James Newton of the Emmanuel recorded in his log the first sighting of an island “seeming […]
They even made it through the Northwest Passage
n The Turks have Piri Reis, whose 1513 map shows parts of America and Antarctica with astonishing and, in the case of Antarctica, frankly inexplicable accuracy. The Chinese have this […]
Centuries of isolation left the Japanese with limited knowledge of world geography
While Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece The Gross Clinic undergoes a facelift on the east coast in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew (my […]
Imagine for the moment a classic work of modern art as pictured above. When a curator takes a heavy and bulky wooden frame, places it around the complex and uncertain […]
The Toscanelli map grossly underestimated the Earth’s circumference (and left out America)
An amazing feat of engineering, but at the cost of much blood and treasure
n As seemed to be the rule in those days, Shane MacGowan‘s stage appearance was over in minutes. After incomprehensibly muttering the lyrics to a new song, a couple of roadies […]
Because of eurocentrism. But probably not for much longer.
Long dead and gone, the Rochester Subway lives on in the imagination – and on this map
1. Asphalt Maine n n Looking down upon the patched-up surface of an unnamed street, J. David Lovejoy couldn’t help noticing a remarkable example of accidental geography. The patch bears […]
The Russian army has been accused of dumping nuclear waste from a base in Latvia into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television.
Three Somali pirates have been killed and others wounded in an overnight gun battle concerning the sharing of a ransom paid for the release of a Greek-flagged supertanker.
Sporadic gunfire, a symptom of the mounting anger and despair, rings out across Haiti’s earthquake-ripped capital Port-au-Prince as locals endure a third night on the torn streets.
Pirates have taken a U.K. flagged chemical tanker off the coast of Somalia in the Gulf of Aden and can be expected to demand a ransom.
Rescue workers are searching for survivors after a ship carrying more than 80 people and a cargo of livestock sank during a storm off the north Lebanese coast.
Facebook’s international expansion began in earnest last year. Now that the company has figured out the whole non-English-speaking-world thing, it’s been smooth sailing. So far so good in Europe and […]
We all have many roles to play in life, and who we are and how we play them defines us.
In case you didn’t catch the story, the newspaper business is in deep trouble. But there’s more to it than the challenge of going digital. Thanks to a last-minute concession […]
A bizarre cottage industry born out of the war in Iraq carries a few lessons about humans and the economy. One, Saddam Hussein was one of the most iconic tyrants […]
The basketball and hip-hop culture term “dunkadelic” was created in 1997. Should the hoops and hip-hop inspired term be applied to the American English dictionary?