The Map Men look at gerrymandering on U.S. electoral district maps. A reasonably comprehensive primer on the subject even if comes from a couple of Brits baffled by the subject. And they finish with a surprisingly sharp point: gerrymanderers wouldn’t know how to draw maps like these if voting intentions weren’t predictable.

There’s no shortage of books about phantom islands—islands on the map that later turn out never to have existed—but now the Map Men have done a video about them, using as a narrative hook the case of Sandy Island, and how it managed to stay on maps into the Google Maps era.

‘As little as ten years ago, maps were something that you just had to live with and everybody had an A-to-Z in the car,’ says Jay, who is the main comedic influence behind the channel, having already found success with a series on London’s architecture called Unfinished London. ‘But now that everyone has a sat nav, I think maps have become, for want of a better word, more geeky. You get people who didn’t realise that they were interested in maps or geography until they see an episode of Map Men and they’ll say: “Oh, yeah, maps are my guilty pleasure.” And I don’t think people would have necessarily talked like that about maps ten years ago, because they used to be something that we depended on. And now they have become something that we enjoy.’

(See previous posts.)

The latest episode of Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones’s all-too-infrequent series Map Men looks at why north is at the top of modern maps, and features examples of maps where this was, or is, not the case, and why.

For something a bit more … academic, see Mick Ashworth’s Why North Is Up: Map Conventions and Where They Came From (Bodleian, 2019).

Previously: The Origins of North at the Top of Maps; The Idea of North.

After a hiatus of more than two and a half years, Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are back to producing new episodes of Map Men. Back in 2016 I called the series “two silly people being very smart about often-silly cartographical situations” (though I may have gotten that backward). Anyway, they’re back, with episodes on the geological origins of the English-Scottish border and trap streets.

Map Men is a YouTube series by comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones. It’s funny as hell, and quite informative too: it’s two silly people being very smart about often-silly cartographical situations. Six episodes so far; I hope they make more. [Geographical]