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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.***Several people responded to our last map by asking where Greenland went. Apparently in the course of flipping around North America, I lost track of it, and while Iceland ended up over by Kamchatka, Greenland disappeared.This isn’t the first time Greenland’s been overlooked, and it probably won’t be the last. For critics of the Mercator projection, of course, the size of Greenland has been a longstanding source of concern. In addition to making a mess of Antarctica, stretching out the polar regions of the globe onto a flat map creates the false impression that Greenland is as large as Africa and exaggerates the size of the United States as well.The odd thing is, though, it’s still not enough to make anyone care about Greenland. In fact, save for a brief moment when its purchase was under consideration, the island almost only ever appears in my social media feed when people are complaining about Mercator maps.What’s more, it turns out the Mercator was never as popular as many imagine. In his book Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier offers a delightful rant on the subject, explaining how many American publishers long ago switched to projections that tried to better balance distortions in size and shape. From 1922 to 1988, for example, National Geographic’s preferred projection was the stylish, if now slightly retro, Van der Grinten.But what, then, of the Mercator’s popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? This, supposedly, is when it was used by “some pro-Western, pro-Imperial types” to