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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All Stories
I’ll meet you at the corner of Saruman and Aragorn
Caught between a rock and a hard place, the EU had better get ready for some of these exit-names
Number of terrorist acts perpetrated in the U.S. by nationals of any of the seven countries? Zero.
A handful of noble families own large tracts of the British capital – and have done so for centuries
A minister misspeaks – and accidentally creates an entire Latin American country
Plotting out the world’s longest pub crawl had a serious, mathematical point
Everything you always wanted to know about the Dutch, but were afraid to ask because they spit while they speak
Death, politics and war – but also Dirty Grandpas, supermoons and all-day breakfasts
A strangely reassuring global directory of close to 8,000 radio stations
Here, it’s men who suffer from a (reverse) gender pay gap
The winning side in the U.S. presidential election rules a vast, contiguous land mass, the losers are cooped up on a far-flung archipelago
The secret Red Line Map that could have given Lower Canada to the U.S.
It’s a web, it’s a cloud – it’s under attack: how outages reveal the actual shape of the internet
Not as cheerful as your standard cartography – but you might learn a thing or two
If only men would vote, Trump would be the next president. If only women voted, Clinton would win by an even bigger landslide.
Welcome to Music City – just click and play!
Europe is the continent where you are most likely to be killed by Liam Neeson.
Only in 1992 was science able to calculate the remotest part of the ocean
The nearest exoplanet ever has been observed, but not yet seen. Is this what the ‘Earth Next Door’ looks like?
The sender didn’t have a name nor an address for his letter. So he drew a map instead.
As this stark map shows, domestic violence against children is still legal in most of the world.
Years of war in the Middle East have erased old borders. Here is what the map currently looks like.
Once the emergency is over, maybe it’s time we drew a different map of Louisiana – however shocking it may be.
The Global economic midpoint is returning to Asia – at increasing speed.
Did you know the Metro to Embarcadero Station passes through a buried Gold Rush ship?
Like most data produced on social media, online bigotry is geotagged. Meaning that hate speech can be mapped. That is exactly what this newest map has done.