When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our ...
In 1569, Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator synthesized existing ideas in navigation and cartography to create a new type of world map. It has stood the test of time: Billions of people would ...
Maps codify the miracle of existence. And the man who wrote the codes for the maps we use today was Gerard Mercator, a cobbler's son, born 500 years ago on a muddy floodplain in northern Europe. In ...
There is an episode in The West Wing television series in which White House press spokesperson CJ Craig meets a delegation of cartographers, who explain that the standard world map — a Mercator ...
The African Union has endorsed the #CorrectTheMap Campaign, a call for the United Nations and the wider global community to use a different kind of world map. The campaign currently has over 4,500 ...
In classrooms, offices, and libraries across the United States, one world map appears again and again: the Mercator projection. Its familiarity makes it feel authoritative, even though it was never ...
The Mercator projection, a centuries-old map style from the age of sail, still prevails in the internet age. Here’s what the African Union wants to use instead ...