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.***Following strikes against Houthi forces in Yemen last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the United States and Britain of “trying to turn the Red Sea into a lake of blood.” It was a rare rhetorical miss for the man whose speaking skills once won him second place in Buzzfeed’s “Most Dynamic Dictator” quiz. I assume what he wanted to say was, “They are trying to turn the Red Sea Red … except with blood this time instead of whatever exactly made it red in the first place.”The “whatever exactly” turns out to be algae. Or possibly the tendency of certain languages to associate colors with cardinal directions. A common theory, endorsed by the Smithsonian, Britannica Kids, and I’m A Useless Info Junkie, holds that the cyanobacteria Trichodesmium Erythraeum blooms and then dies off, turning the sea’s water a reddish-brown color. The other prevailing theory, endorsed by a rival Smithsonian web page and an authoritative-sounding guy who wrote in to the New York Times in the ’80s, is that some ancient languages, perhaps Persian in particular, associated “south” with the color red.Similar debates, in fact, rage for other seas as well. There’s general agreement that the Yellow Sea takes its name from an excess of silt, while the White Sea is named after all the ice. The Black Sea, though, either comes from the fact it looks black, or the fact Turkic languages connect that color with “north.”I have little to contribute to these etymological debates. But one thing is clear: Ever since the ancient Greeks settled on calling it the Red Sea, some mapmakers