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
There’s a very curious link between topography and personality.
That picture of you at the Royal Observatory astride the Greenwich Meridian? It’s a lie.
The famous Keep Calm and Carry On poster had a First World War antecedent.
Travel around the world in half an hour, with time to spare for an ice cream.
An interesting point in case are the twin maps of Africa shown here, one of the spread of Islam, the other the spread of AIDS. Beware of the map that is too straightforward and simple.
Country-shaped birthmarks also exist outside of Wes Anderson movies.
If every great story is a journey, then few are more in need of a road map than True Detective.
“Print this map. Get off the internet. Take to the streets.”
Europeans are aging fast, and moving more — creating pockets of population growth amidst increasingly empty rural areas.
Ninety years ago, America invented the Human Map, an art form now dominated by India.
Almost a century after its dissolution, two hilarious anecdotes are the Free State’s main legacy.
Bees produce honey, beeswax and… maps? Yes they do, if they’re one of Ren Ri’s swarms.
Portugal is Europe’s face? Only in a Pessoa poem. And on this map.
Fleeing the Norman Conquest, English émigrés established a now-forgotten New England on the northern shore of the Black Sea.
King coal has been dethroned for decades. Yet he still determines how Brits vote.
The Taliban are undefeated. Should that earn them a state of their own?
Will Britain leave the EU? Would Maggie abandon Marge?
A musical map of Minneapolis celebrates the resurrection of The Replacements.
Afghanistan’s ‘Iron Emir’ asserted his independence from the British and Russians by using one of their imperial tools against them — cartography.
Few people know of them. That’s why they’re called the Happy Isles.
Best mash-up ever: Pac-Man invades Google Maps.
To keep you safe from harm, the British government has prepared 47 maps of areas around the world you should avoid.
Joy Division’s iconic “soundscape” was designed by a Cornell University astronomer.
In 1931, Norway annexed part of Greenland. It could have been the start of a very Cold War indeed.
A bizarre Islamic splinter lodged deep in the body of Europe.