“What if we took each sourdough selfie, each Zoom class, each Peloton ride, each Netflix binge and mapped the ecology of resources and services that have made it possible for some of us? And at the same time impossible for others?” On pandemic maps and the Great Pause.
geography
Posted inArts & Culture, Business & Tech, History, Nonfiction, Quotes
‘London Was, But Is No More’
A loving, fascinating, melancholy, rollicking look at how technology and globalization are transforming urban spaces.
Posted inBusiness & Tech, Nonfiction, Quotes
Why Should a Website Decide Where You’re From?
In Real Life Mag, information accessibility and data-use expert Zara Rahman explores the coercive power of the location drop-down menu.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
An Emotional Tour of History: Naming Lakes After the Fallen
Des Kappel is the toponymist in charge of naming the 90,000 remaining land features and lakes in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Kappel’s work is often an emotional tour through history as he collects letters and photos of war casualties for his database.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Practical Cartography: I Am Mapped, Therefore I Am
Lois Parshley’s wide-ranging, fascinating story on mapping the unmapped — from black holes, to the bottom of the sea, to the populations of the Congo and Haiti — looks at not just the science of map-making, but the morality.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World
Maps are how we orient ourselves, and how we donate a place’s value — and by extension, the value of that place’s inhabitance. What does that means for the place still left un-mapped?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘We Don’t Know What Is Changing in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers.’
A study by neurologists at University College London found that the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial navigation, of a London cabby is significantly larger than those in the rest of the human population—a result of the intense memorization and route-finding undertaken while doing The Knowledge. The study involved taking regular brain […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The End of the Line: A Microbus Map of Damascus
Matthew McNaught | Syria Comment | June 2013 | 18 minutes (4,615 words) Matthew McNaught taught English in Syria between 2007 and 2009. He now works in mental health and sometimes writes essays and stories. This piece first appeared in Syria Comment, and our thanks to McNaught for allowing us to republish it here. 1. Here is a […]