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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The most feared sexually transmitted disease (STD) of the last half-millennium was usually named after foreigners, often the French.
Stockholm Syndrome is the most famous of 10 psychological disorders named after world cities. Most relate to tourism or hostage-taking.
Maps can do more than show us places. They also can help determined people find others long lost, whether birth mothers or fugitive killers.
Famished, not famous: retrace Orwell’s hunger days, when he was one of the city’s legion of poor foreigners.
One player’s pawn is another’s farmer. And at one time, the queen was a rather powerless virgin.
Opponents of America’s entry into the looming Second World War believed the U.S. would be dismembered.
France is split in two by its very own “desert,” the Empty Diagonal. The area’s depopulation is fairly recent, and Paris is to blame.
Many of the furniture giant’s products are named after Swedish locations. Not everyone is happy about that.
With sea levels rising, the Dutch are pondering floating cities — while also exporting their engineering know-how to turn a tidy profit.
Most “irrecoverable carbon” is concentrated in these tiny bits of the Earth’s land mass. Can we keep it there?
This map of Hutterite colonies in North America says something about religion and evolution — and more precisely, speciation.
The nascent field of geopsychology shows that the Big Five personality traits vary by region. But not all results conform to stereotype.
The “Euro Night Sprinter” map is utopian, but Europe’s rail future could look a lot like it.
On long-haul flights, some airlines show shipwrecks on their in-flight maps. The aim is to entertain; the result is often to horrify.
69 percent of the global diet is “foreign,” says a study that pinpoints the origin of 151 food crops.
The 2021 Quality of Government Index shows how much trust the citizens of Europe place in each other and in their elected politicians.
The thrills and horrors of strange heavenly bodies condensed into one attractive snapshot.
Two mounds of rice and a tiny flag in a sea of curry is enough to re-heat an old territorial conflict.
This map shows that the territories discovered by Europeans add up to an area no bigger than Utah.
This might help you make it to the end of Herman Melville’s 19th century classic.
U.S. states vary radically in terms of electricity generation. Vermont is the cleanest, while Delaware is the dirtiest.
All of these conflicts have a long history. They may also have a long future.
Esoteric evidence points to a ritual performed by Queen Elizabeth’s court magician John Dee.
Discovered in 1900, the Saint-Bélec slab languished unrecognized in a castle basement for over a century.
Starting just about now, leaves start changing color from north to south, high to low, light to dark.
In Louisiana, high school starts at 7:30 am. Research shows that is at least an hour too early.
One of the best-known allegorical depictions of love has a rather pessimistic male twin.
The four-color theorem was one of the past century’s most popular and enduring mathematical mysteries.
Even 1500 years after the fall of Rome, its western border can still be seen on German street maps.
Americans don’t like to ride the bus. There are ways to fix that.