The New Yorker Cover and its Imitators

 In 1976, Saul Steinberg illustrated this famous cover for the New Yorker.

The humorously exaggerated myopia of a “typical“ New Yorker led to many imitations across the world. I found a bunch of examples on the David Rumsey Map Collection when looking for something completely unrelated. Here is Milwaukee. 

Interestingly this version has a foreground as well as a background. It also features a better sense of geographic accuracy than the original though the China-Japan-Russia bit is basically duplicated. Look at tiny little Chicago! Saratoga Springs is an interesting addition though its location in Connecticut is a bit off.

 Here is another example with mountains and skiers.

An international perspective, looking westward from Les Deux Magots.

Here is a looking east perspective. This one shows rival colleges. Perhaps ones with better geography departments as the distant locations of Heidelberg and Eton are flipped.

This one is probably my favorite. “One of Chicago’s two great airports“ exaggerating the centrality of Midway while implying that you need to travel almost to Siberia just to get to the chaos of O’Hare Airport.

Flood Zone Exemptions for Camp Mystic

Last week’s devastating floods in central Texas killed more than two dozen people, many of them at Camp Mystic, a children’s camp for girls. The camp asked FEMA to change their flood maps after a 2011 revision placed much of the camp in a floodplain. FEMA responded by removing more than a dozen buildings from their flood zones in 2013 and then again in 2019 and 2020. Buildings outside of the 100 year flood zone (areas that tend to flood much more frequently than every 100 years) are exempt from needing flood insurance. They are also exempt from more stringent requirements such as elevating the buildings or shoring up their foundations. 

Here is a screen shot from FEMA’s map showing the “floodway” (the zone where water moves quickly during a flood) in the hatched colors and the 100 year flood zone in blue. This is where many of the girls were swept away by moving water. Some of the cabins were in the orange or unshaded areas which are not considered part of the flood zone.

 Another section further up Cypress Creek shows more clearly that many cabins are outside of the blue 100 year floodplain.

First Street, a climate risk modeling agency drew their own maps showing an increased risk of flooding for many of the cabins exempted from FEMA’s maps.

map from First Street, via KUT Austin

An excellent article from NPR's KUT affiliate in Austin shows these maps and provides links to letters of map amendment asking for exemptions of certain buildings.

Banana Point

Banana Point (Pointe de Banana) is a peninsula at the mouth of the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I was looking at the area on Google Maps when I found this image.

Image by local guide Fabrice Kaj

What is this map? Where does it reside? Does it just sit on the beach, getting wet? Probably not. I did some research but the only thing I could come up with is this Facebook video, showing a local historian and sailor (name not listed as far as I can tell, though he is referred to as the "library of the Republic" ).

Image via Facebook

My poor translation abilities mean that some of my takeaways from the video may be incorrect. The "bibliotheque" stands at the mouth of the river pointing out the various features of the map and gives a little history and geography of the area.

Image via Facebook

 

 

 

Banana Point is the large crown-like symbol. The map is oriented so south is at the top and looks to Angola. Curiously after a mere 35 kilometers of DRC coastline to the north, you are in Angola again, in the exclave of Cabinda. The Congo River has the third largest discharge and is the deepest river in the world. The flow between Banana Point and Angola is broken into three zones with the middle 2 kilometers representing the river flow out to sea. I believe the video states that the river flows 135 kilometers beyond the mouth into the ocean.

Portuguese sailors knew they were near a large river's mouth when their ship was suddenly pushed to the west by the current.  The islands inland from the mouth are full of mangroves and contained native settlements when colonists took over. The large island marked Bulambemba was taken over and used as a prison by the colonists. Diogo Cão was credited in Europe for having "discovered" the river's mouth in 1482 but, of course, there were millennia of history and knowledge of the river's geography and culture before him.