and even more maps….

Phoebe Connelly

these even more pleasing because they are cartograms. A cartogram, for us non-cartographers, is: a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with a size proportional not to their sheer topographic acreage -- which has little to do with politics -- but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. Thus, on such a map, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island. Check them out here.

Phoebe Connelly, a former managing editor at In These Times, is Web Editor at The American Prospect.
The text is from the poem “QUADRENNIAL” by Golden, reprinted with permission. It was first published in the Poetry Project. Inside front cover photo by Golden.
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