Tag: geography

A loving, fascinating, melancholy, rollicking look at how technology and globalization are transforming urban spaces.

In Real Life Mag, information accessibility and data-use expert Zara Rahman explores the coercive power of the location drop-down menu.

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.

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.

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 […]

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.