A Global View of Wildfires

The Guardian maps the devastation wrought by wildfires across the globe. “Brazil, Bolivia, Russia, Australia and Canada have all endured some of their worst fire seasons in recent years, as heatwaves stoked by fossil fuel pollution drive the risk of extreme blazes higher. The maps, using data from the University of Maryland, show some of the hardest-hit forests.”

The Last Unmapped Places

Lois Parshley’s essay on the last unmapped, mysterious places—Greenlandic fjords, the slums of Haiti, the ocean’s depths, black holes in space—is a long read worth reading. Originally published last month as “Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World” in the Virginia Quarterly Review, it’s been reprinted by the Guardian, in an edited, tighter version, as “Faultlines, Black Holes and Glaciers: Mapping Uncharted Territories.”

San Serriffe

San SerriffeOn 1 April 1977, the Guardian published something that has become known as one of the finest April Fool’s gags in history: a seven-page supplement about the fictional, “semi-colonial” island of San Serriffe, complete with a map (at right) full of typographic puns and gags. The Guardian has a page on the gag and has reprinted a couple of the articles here and herethe Museum of Hoaxes has scans of the entire supplement.