Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
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Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain are a pair of young Brazilian artists, working in their home country and in France. Some of their work explores fonts and maps. Typography meets […]
China is the world’s most populous nation (1). That much anybody knows. But even if we know a bit more (that the number of Chinese is around 1.32 billion, which […]
The map of the Bay Area has been in your hands all along
Now that Russia has recognised the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the improbable phantom nation of Transnistria (1) might be gearing up for its own fifteen minutes of geopolitical […]
Genetically speaking, Finns and Italians are the most atypical Europeans. There is a large degree of overlap between other European ethnicities, but not up to the point where they would […]
Independent from Denmark for a week every year, the kingdom of Elleore has acquired a fair number of quirks since its founding in 1944.
This conspiracy map shows a world in which all national armies police places far from home, as a way of enforcing World Government.
n n “I was watching TV and noticed an informercial for cure-all vitamin supplement with a unique map background,” writes John Deal, who immediately grabbed a camera and took a […]
The fledgling state managed to elect a Miss Absaroka 1939 before disappearing into the dustbin of history
n n (click on image to enlarge) n The Zeitgeist of the mid ‘fifties probably wasn’t shrinkwrapped in quite so many layers of irony and political correctness as today’s is, […]
n n What is it with airlines and maps? Which part of ‘atlas’ don’t they understand? You’d think that, being the business of transportation, they’d get their distances and directions […]
nMississippi is the fattest state in the Union, with 30.1% of Mississippians being obese. That’s almost one in every three inhabitants. Not that the Magnolia State (in red on this […]
n n In 1989, Swedish author Herman Lindquist published Rapporter från Mittens Rike (‘Reports from the Middle Kingdom’). The title of the book is ambiguous, as it refers to the well-known […]
Spain, now a fully integrated member of the European Union, once was considered so alien to the rest of Europe that Alexandre Dumas is known to have remarked that “Africa […]
Cannibalism is the ultimate yardstick for barbarity, and the ideal excuse to subjugate the accused
This crazy scheme would have restored the prehistoric land bridge between the UK and the Continent
The Toscanelli map grossly underestimated the Earth's circumference (and left out America)
n n I first encountered the term ‘galoshes’ in the same Russian novels that also introduced me, albeit equally theoretically, to the samowar*. Subsequently, I’ve always thought of galoshes (also […]
n n An interesting proposal has surfaced to help resolve the intra-Belgian political stalemate between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speakers, who prevail in Brussels and Wallonia: a couloir francophone (‘Francophone corridor’) […]
n China has land borders with 14 other countries – a world record*. And yet you should not think of China as particularly well-integrated with its neighbours. In fact, as […]
The rough beauty of the American West seems as far as you can get from the polished corridors of power in Washington DC.
The semi-mythical Greek is not only the father of the epic poem, but also of geography
Did we miss a utopia or avoid a disaster?
The map on the bedroom wall of every teenage Bilderberger
n Genetically modified crops are controversial and indeed have been banned in several locations because of concerns that they may cause unintended, as yet unforeseen and potentially hazardous consequences. These […]
“With the help of a GPS device and DHL, I have drawn a self portrait on our planet,” writes Swedish artist Erik Nordenankar on his website for the project, appropriately […]
n This is a print ad for a Dutch brand of ice coffee, the slogan of which is: ‘The Ice Cold Coffee Kick For On the Road’. The drink’s interest […]
n The Eurovision Song Contest proves that H.L. Mencken’s famous dictum about quality standards in the US media – “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public” […]
The title of Daniel Mansfield’s email was ‘Cheese Map of Canada’, so I immediately thought it would be a variation on the bread map of France (described earlier on this blog […]