The Strait That Stayed Shut
Five stories from the past four days where the map is doing the talking: a strait that stays shut, a war creeping back across the Ethiopian highlands, a...
The Steppe Warriors Who Out-Bureaucrated an Empire
Khan Boris I, who converted Bulgaria to Christianity in 864 under Byzantine pressure and turned it into a rival civilization rather than a satellite. Trace...
Three Weeks Before Barbarossa
Pick a date in the Second World War and you can usually see the war moving. Pick 1 June 1941 and you get something rarer: a pause. Germany and its partners...
The World Voted to Redraw Itself
This issue goes sideways instead of backwards. Five stories from the past four days in which the map itself is the story: a projection retired by vote at the...
The Map That Went to War
Put the United States of 1790 next to the United States of 1860 and the difference is not really about numbers. It is about direction. In 1790, slavery is an...
The Nations Inside Spain
Colour in every part of Spain with an organised movement arguing it ought to be its own country, and the Spanish flag ends up holding rather less of the map...
Five Lines That Aren't Borders
The Strait of Hormuz from orbit. Thirty-nine kilometres wide at its narrowest, with the inbound and outbound shipping lanes running through Omani territorial...
Who Stands Behind the Line
Five stories from the past few days where the real subject wasn't where the border runs, but who stands behind it. Everything below comes from the wires —...
Lines That Were Meant to Be Temporary
The Strait of Hormuz is about 39 kilometres across at its narrowest, and every metre of it sits inside somebody's territorial sea — Iran's on one shore,...
Five Chokepoints, One Week
The Black Sea has exactly one exit. Everything loaded at Odesa or Novorossiysk has to pass through the Bosphorus — which is why a fight over port cranes is...
The Line That Split the World
A later cartographic rendering of the Tordesillas line of 1494, the meridian by which Spain and Portugal divided the non-Christian world between them. In...
5 Ways the Map Moved This Week
The Strait of Hormuz. Roughly 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest, with the deep-water shipping lanes hugging the Omani side — and this week Iran said it was...
5 Ways the Map Moved This Week
The Strait of Gibraltar. Fourteen kilometres of water separate two continents here — and on its African shore sits Ceuta, a Spanish city and an EU external...
The Oil Shock That Turned France Nuclear
The cooling towers of Cattenom, one of 56 reactors built in France's crash nuclear program after the 1973 oil shock. Map the share of electricity each...
5 Ways the Map Moved This Week
The Strait of Hormuz — the two-mile-wide shipping lane at the mouth of the Persian Gulf that has dominated five months of war news, and whose closure has now...
Everyone Wants to Be Rome
Color in every country that has, at some point in its history, officially claimed to be the true heir of the Roman Empire, and the map stops looking like...
How Humanity Doubled Its Lifespan
Edward Jenner vaccinating a boy, painted by E.-E. Hillemacher. Vaccination was one of the first tools in the revolution that doubled human lifespans. Look at...
"Two Chokepoints, One Handover: 5 Ways the Map Moved This Week"
Four days of feeds, five moves on the map: two oil chokepoints under threat at once, occupied ground changing hands in south Lebanon, a new commander for...
The Empire That Spoke Eleven Languages
Emperor Franz Joseph I, who ruled the Habsburg lands for 68 years — long enough to be the only sovereign most of his eleven nations had ever known. Look at...
"5 Ways the Map Moved This Week"
Five days, five stories that moved a border, a coastline, or a front line — plus a map from our library that puts one of them in scale. 1. US and Iran trade...
