When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

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.Earlier this summer, a minor controversy erupted over a map in the Mattel Barbie movie. Despite being hand-drawn, wildly inaccurate, and in a Mattel Barbie movie, the map had a line on it, and that line had some dashes. To make a not terribly long story short, it definitely wasn’t the Chinese government’s nine-dash line, but it was definitely a dashed line somewhere in the Pacific. As a result, Vietnam banned the movie and Ted Cruz denounced it as Communist propaganda. Then, the rest of the world moved on.But — as I discovered watching Oppenheimer the other night — this was just the beginning of Hollywood’s cartographic misdeeds. If the Barbie map controversy was niche, the Oppenheimer map controversy remains so niche as to be totally non-existent. No one else is even aware of it, and God knows the people I saw the movie with didn’t want to hear more. Still, encouraged by so many other aggressively pedantic critiques of the film, I press on undeterred.One key scene in the movie shows a 1949 conversation in which Robert Oppenheimer and several other physicists receive news of the Soviet Union’s first atomic test and discuss the prospect of building a hydrogen bomb. They are sitting around a table and clearly visible on that table is a map: Maurice Gomberg’s self-published “Post-War New World Map,” from 1942.Maurice Gomberg, Outline of Post-War New World Map, 1942.Gomberg was an academic from Philadelphia who had some distinctly distinct ideas about what international politics should look like after World War