Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible. *** Maps, marriage, and painfully drawn-out metaphors have existed since the beginning of time. But it was only in the salons of 17th-century France that someone first thought to combine all three. The result was Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte du Tendre, an exhaustively detailed allegory of the land of love. Carte
