Strange Maps

Not too many decades ago, being a child in the western world meant having a license to roam: you spent a large chunk of your free time outside, exploring your surroundings, chasing adventure. This is the Huckleberry Finn mould of carefree childhood - even if you weren’t floating down the ... Read More

How do you know you’re watching a Wes Anderson movie? Here are a few clues: an abundance of matching tracksuits, official school attire, or other types of uniform; a nostalgic setting in a recent, pre-digital past; and a panoply of dysfunctional characters, inhabiting meticulously manicured houses ... Read More

In the two decades since German reunification, the German government has spent up to €1,6 billion on upgrading the defunct economic infrastructure of the communist East to match that of the capitalist West. Yet differences, and associated resentments, between the former BRD and DDR [1] persist ... Read More

George Soros last Sunday blamed Angela Merkel for the euro crisis - and gave her three months to fix it. Speaking at the 7th Festival of Economics in Trento (Italy), the renowned hedge-fund magnate pinpointed the moment when Germany, traditionally the engine of European integration, reversed gears ... Read More

"The plain is bleak and tired, and has surrendered, The plain is bleak and dead - devoured by the city." [1] In Les villes tentaculaires, the symbolist poet Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) indicts the insatiable hunger with which the modern city gobbles up the surrounding countryside ... Read More

An angelic lady from the pre-raphaelite school of femmes fatales is stretched across a map of Europe. Her raised hands clutch a sketch of the late-19th-century European rail network at two of its budding nodes: Paris and Dresden. The lady’s feet and dress are spilling into Italy. The clue to the ... Read More

Maps usually display only one layer of information. In most cases, they're limited to the topography, place names and traffic infrastructure of a certain region. True, this is very useful, and in all fairness quite often it's all we ask for. But to reduce cartography to a schematic of accessibility ... Read More

Just before Rip Van Winkle falls into his thirty-year slumber, he encounters the ghostly spectacle of a handful of ancient Dutch colonials playing at ninepins, the thunder rolling across the Catskills as they bowl their balls.   This images has a similar, eerie quality. It shows a dozen ... Read More

Did you know that almost 90% of the world’s population lives in the northern hemisphere? And that half of all Earthlings [1] reside north of 27°N? Or that the average human lives at 24 degrees from the equator - either to its north or south? Bill Rankin did. Or at least he found out, while ... Read More

GPS technology is opening up exciting new hybrid forms of mapping and art. Or in this case: cycling, mapping and art. The maps on this page are the product of Michael Wallace, a Baltimore-based artist who uses his bike as a paintbrush, and the city as his canvas.  As Wallace traces shapes and ... Read More

In a dream-like scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, the titular tyrant [1] gently plucks a large globe from its standalone frame, holds it longingly in his arms and dances it across his office to the tones of Wagner’s Lohengrin.   The globe dance is a variation - arguably one too ... Read More

Some maps are beautiful because of their rich complexity. Others capture our attention because they are so starkly simple.   Cartography has the curious capacity to bypass a map-reader’s critical function when conveying information, and never more so than when a map is plain and simple. Two ... Read More

  The map is not the territory [1], but this collection gets closer than most [2]. Earth Platinum, published at the end of February in an edition limited to 31 copies, is the world’s largest atlas. The book is 1.8 m (6 ft) high and 1.4 m (4.5 ft) wide. When opened, it spans 2.8 m (9 ft). It ... Read More

It ain't easy being slime. If you're sticky and viscous, you're going to be the gooey butt of persistent negative stereotyping. Slime-ophobia has been one long (and disgustingly dripping) thread throughout popular culture for the last half-century at least. Here's a handful of movie references ... Read More

It’s 1849, and a Gold Rush is drawing thousands of American prospectors to California, which was snatched from Mexico only a year earlier [1]. The lay of the land is still poorly surveyed, the risks and resources of the terrain as yet largely unknown.  So US President Zachary Taylor initiates a ... Read More