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Ancient China was less equal than the Roman Empire. Here’s why.
For about 250 years at the beginning of our era, two ancient superpowers coexisted at opposite ends of the vast Eurasian land mass. The Roman Empire and China’s Han Dynasty were too far apart to be in...
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Why China is eating its tiny neighbor, Bhutan
Your neighbor is eating you, bit by bit. He’s strong and you’re weak, so if you protest too much against his occasional nibbling, he might just swallow you whole instead. Your best option is to play...
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Evolution isn’t a straight line: Modern humans come from 2 ancient lineages
“Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.” Like Goethe’s Doctor Faust, we all have an inner duality. Recent discoveries about the deep past of human evolution reveal that for more than a million years,...
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Is this acre in England really American territory?
If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England. Did those famous opening lines of “The Soldier”, a sonnet by World War I poet Rupert...
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Mapped: How warm your city will be in the 2080s
The way we’re not dealing with climate change has changed. We’re no longer willfully denying the mounting danger. We’re cheerfully ignoring it. As a telling example, consider a new type of summer story...
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Mapped: The boundaries of human perception
Thirty-five years ago, the Voyager 1 space probe turned its camera toward Earth and snapped a photograph from 3.7 billion miles away. The now-iconic image, dubbed the “Pale Blue Dot” by the author and...
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The strange cartography of Superman’s ever-shifting hometown
Can you name three famous Delawareans? You probably get as far as Joe Biden and Aubrey Plaza. If you’re stuck for the last one, you can now confidently point to…Superman. This year’s Superman reboot...
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Africa wants its true size on the world map
On a world map in the Mercator projection, Russia appears larger than Africa. In fact, Africa (11.7 million sq mi, 30.4 million km2) is nearly twice as large as Russia (6.6 million sq mi, 17.1 million...
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Mapped: If America were 100 people, this is what they’d believe
If the U.S. were only 100 people, this is what they’d believe: 63 are Christian, 30 are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 have a non-Christian faith. This graph maps those differences out into more...
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“The Chinese Job”: Spain’s wild 1580s plan to conquer the world — via Beijing
Imagine bullfights in Beijing, Chinese conquistadors capturing Constantinople for Spain, and a Habsburg Empire that completely encircled the globe. Spain’s King Philip II certainly did. His fever dream...
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America’s post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines
The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the...
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7,000-year-old underwater wall raises questions about ancient engineering —...
“This can’t be natural,” thought Yves Fouquet. The geologist was studying a newly produced undersea depth chart, generated with LIDAR technology, for the waters off Finistère — the jagged western tip...
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Memorizing London’s 25,000 streets changes cabbies’ brains — and may prevent...
To the casual observer, a London taxi driver is just a guy who knows a shortcut to Heathrow and has strong opinions on local weather and politics (“This bloody Starmer and his leftie government”). But...
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Welcome to McKinley: How the U.S. almost colonized a chunk of Cuba
In an abandoned cemetery on Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud stands the weathered headstone of Estefania Koenig. When she died in 1981, at the ripe old age of 95, she was the last American of what had once...
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Militarized snowflakes: The accidental beauty of Renaissance star forts
War is hell. But war is also geometry. And geometry can be quite beautiful. Prime examples of that disturbing paradox are the so-called star forts that proliferated throughout Renaissance Europe. Seen...
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We saved the world once — we can do it again
In the late 20th century, the world came together to plug a hole in the ozone layer — the part of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs most of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. If left unchecked,...
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Ghost map: Europe’s first glimpse of Tenochtitlan shows a city already destroyed
For early 16th-century Europeans, this map was a revelation. It showed a previously unknown island metropolis in the recently discovered Americas — an alien Venice, if you will. However, by the time...
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How the modern world turned gray (and why color may be coming back)
No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a...
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The Strait of Hormuz is today’s energy chokepoint. China is tomorrow’s.
Here’s something you didn’t know about the Strait of Hormuz: It is named after Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian sky god. And here’s another: In about 20 years, Iran will likely be unable to throttle the...
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The Irish language is having a moment — and running out of time
In July, the European Union’s rotating Council Presidency will issue official communications in the Irish language, alongside English, in a historic first. Government ministers from Ireland, which...
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Follow the money: Mapping millionaire migration across America
Since 2018, around 102,600 millionaires have left California. In the same period, 61,400 Americans with at least seven figures to their name have packed up and left New York state. Where have they...
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How playgrounds reinvented childhood
Fictional though they are, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn exemplify a lost truth about American kids up until the 1880s: Childhood was wild. Like millions of their real-life contemporaries, the...
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Cathedral of bones: Inside the world’s largest, deepest, and oldest whale...
Life on Earth is older, stranger, and more grimly beautiful than we have time to consider most days. So take a moment to marvel over the recently discovered dark wonder that is the world’s oldest,...
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Why do we divide politics into left vs. right? Blame France.
Why do we grade politicians on a spectrum from left to right? Blame the French. On September 11th, 1789, France’s newly formed National Assembly voted on whether to grant the king a veto over its laws....
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Mapped: How Islam (not Germanic invaders) likely ended antiquity
In 1922, the Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne wrote, “Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would never have existed, and without Muhammad, Charlemagne would be inconceivable.” That controversial thesis...
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Mapped: America’s 10 most creative acts of noncompliance
Before the United States was a country, it was a rebellion: against kings, taxes, and the general idea that someone far away has the right to tell you what to do. In that very foundational sense,...
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A brief reminder of the folly of war (Korea edition)
In case you need a reminder that war is not just evil and destructive, but can also be just plain stupid, study this map. It shows how much territory changed hands after the Korean War, which lasted...
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American literature, charted in one monumental map
The second map ever featured on Strange Maps — back in 2006, when it was still a fledgling WordPress blog — was a literary take on Maine. It showed the real and imagined places that tether Stephen...
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How Earth’s night lights became our most honest economist
Don’t believe the Kremlin. It claims that from 2020 to 2024, the Russian economy grew by 13%. Instead, believe the lights Russians leave on at night. They reveal the country’s GDP actually shrank by 8%...
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Ends with a bang: Why lightning stopped stalking the Strait of Malacca
A bolt from the blue that never strikes the same place twice: Lightning is the proverbial placeholder for the unpredictable. Nature’s light show erupts whenever and wherever positive and negative...
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