Geography

Places to look at the world sideways, one map at a time.

Maps

• Brilliant Maps (Website) — “making sense of the world, one map at a time”: each post pairs a map with the point it argues, from where US Supreme Court justices were born and Europe’s declining robbery rates to the most misspelled word in every American state, plus interactive pieces like a Mercator-vs-true-size comparison tool and minefield games that ask you to name countries with their borders erased.

Rivers & landscapes

• Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? (Article) — Natalie Wolchover in Quanta on Hack’s law, found by USGS scientist John Hack in 1957: from brook to mighty river, a stream’s length scales with its drainage area to the power 0.6, so small basins are short and squat and large ones long and thin. The “optimal channel network” explanation says that shape dissipates the least energy draining rain to the sea, and erosion models show landscapes reorganising their way to it. Also covers the ~72° angle at which streams fork, and the April 2026 Science cover finding that river deltas obey the same 0.6 exponent.