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.***Over the past year, publications like the New York Times have faced an unrelenting stream of criticism for their Middle East coverage. Readers from rival political perspectives have all taken part, attacking newspapers for everything from misleading headlines to mistaken facts.I, for one, was hoping to pile on. But before I had the chance, I got distracted fact-checking this flippantly bizarre 1929 Time magazine map about the same subject. At a moment when publications try all too hard and still fall short, it’s nostalgic to look back on an era when they barely tried at all.Time Magazine, Sept. 09, 1929. https://time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/map1.pngUnder the title “Islam v. Israel,” Time offered readers an overview of the most recent bout of intercommunal violence in the Holy Land, then under British rule. The writing is certainly colorful. There’s the “bristling” and “florid” General Dobbie, and the “handsome, brusque” Sir John Chancellor. The coverage also has a certain candor. Alongside Jewish accounts of a pogrom in Safed, there appears, as a caveat, “The Moslem version of the affray could not be learned.”But what’s most striking, in both the article and the accompanying map, are the engagingly dismissive descriptions of the region’s leaders. Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk “loves Cordon Rouge.” Jordanian Emir Abdullah is “a contented British puppet whose chief delight is in breeding priceless Arab steeds.” Iraq’s King Feisal, in turn, is introduced as the “inventor of a special headdress named after him.” Finally, there’s the “tall, sagacious, tortoise-spectacled Ibn Saud,” and “fat King Fuad,” who “loves mules.”As irrelevant details go, most of these