In the late 1800s, an Iraqi archaeologist discovered the oldest existing world map, known as the Imago Mundi, or simply, the Babylonian Map of the World. Although it’s a clay tablet dating from 700-500 BCE, its schematic will be striking familiar to today’s users of Google Maps. That’s because it shows Babylon at the center, surrounded by a vast sea. Much like the beeping blue dots on our screens, the ancient Mesopotamian cartographers were, by default, at the center of everything.

Yet thanks to today’s technology, that centrality is astoundingly real. Indeed, one could argue that if maps once shaped our lives, today we’re shaping them: Rather than collective entities in which we all partake, Google Mapped cities have become extensions of our preferences and personalities. Far more than the fastest route from points A to B, our smartphones can tell us where we’d like to eat or pray (and perhaps soon, where we’d like to love, too). The road through cities and even whole countries has been smoothed out, just for us.

This phenomenon is the starting point for several recent EconTalks. For example, photographer Chris Arnade, who travels the world by foot, insists that it’s in the rough edges where we make the best connections. And while he does use certain AI tools to find safe and efficient walking routes, he eschews the Google Maps approach in favor of one that allows for genuine encounters with other cultures and ways of life. The result, he admits, is lots of sup-par meals and ugly industrial zones. But it’s also moments of joy and even spirituality.

If Paulina Rowinska comes at maps from a different angle, she arguably ends up in the same place. A mathematician who studies the science behind representing and navigating our world, she argues that understanding “mapmatics” is what gives places their nuance—effectively making them the opposite of “smooth.” When you learn, for instance, why your country’s coastline can be as short or as long as you want, you also learn what makes your country unique—and how that uniqueness has helped shape you.

For these guests—and until recently, for all of humanity—a place isn’t simply a backdrop to be moved through efficiently. We see this, as well, in Russ’ conversation with literary scholar David Wyatt about Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Here, civil war-torn Spain is a character unto itself, conveying through its landscapes the emotions the protagonist can’t always articulate. By contrast, Google Maps runs the risk of turning everything into a too clean and well-lighted place. As no less than king of life hackers Tim Ferriss claims in his talk about what it means to be him, there is such a thing—believe it or not—as too much optimization. Finding parking spots? Absolutely. But for exploring an unknown city, maybe (for a while) put away the phone. Who knows what awaits those who dare to veer off the beeping-blue-dot road? In the absence of smoothness may lie serendipity.

Marla Braverman

Editor at EconTalk

Mining the Conversation

A selection of additional EconTalk episodes that explore the surprising outcomes of charting new territory.

Michael Easter on the Comfort Crisis Journalist Michael Easter isn’t alone in decrying the downsides of our comfortable lives, from anxiety and depression to existential malaise. Where he shines is in his argument for the value of embracing difficulty, which requires leaving our comfort zones—often (read: Alaskan backcountry) very literally.

Rebecca Struthers on Watches, Watchmaking, and the Hands of Time When a naval disaster cost Britain thousands of soldiers in the early 18th century, the race was on to solve the Longitude Problem: a navigational challenge that required accuracy down to a single degree. Enter the portable clock, which changed the way we move through and interact with the world in unexpected and profound ways. 

Matthew Crawford on Why We Drive What do we lose when we give our keys to Uber, and the wheel to self-driving cars? According to philosopher and mechanic Matthew B. Crawford, a lot more than we think. Using driving as a window through which to explore broader changes in our digital age, Crawford makes a case for reclaiming the driver’s seat—to gain skills and confidence, assert our independence, and enjoy true freedom.

Richard Epstein on Cruises, First-Class Travel, and Inequality We’ve all secretly envied first-class airplane travelers—and on long flights, maybe hated them, too. But what if inequality in a free-market system is actually an incentive to create more wealth, with benefits for everyone? Taking his insight from the skies to the high seas, Epstein offers a new way of looking at taxation and redistribution.

Conversation Starters

An eclectic collection of books, films, poems, and podcasts that use maps as starting-off points for intellectual adventurism.

Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will Combining detailed maps with local lore, facts with personal observation, Judith Schalansky’s whimsical pocket atlas proves that if paradise is an island—hell is most certainly one, too. Come for the descriptions of tiny dots in vast oceans, stay for the strange stories they each contain.

Absalom, Absalom! With the map at the end of his famous novel about ownership and property, William Faulkner declares himself owner and proprietor of his own fictional territory. In so doing, he lifts this and all his (hot, humid) novels set in Mississippi out of their specific time and place and into the realm of mythology. 

The Atlas Obscura Podcast An audio guide to the incredible, the unusual, and the downright weird other atlases hide in plain sight. Learn where to take a date you want to impress (August 4th), where to stash a body (June 3rd), and where to go to really get off the grid (March 14th), among other place-based pieces of advice.

“Map,” by Wisława Szymborska, is the last poem the Nobel Prize laureate completed before her death in 2012. While its speaker celebrates maps for presenting “a world/not of this world,” the poem describes—plainly, beautifully, and with great humor—the very real experience all map lovers will understand.

The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain (available on Netflix and Amazon Prime), a romantic comedy based on the real Welsh village of Taff’s Well, tells the story of two English cartographers who declare that a mountain is actually a hill, thus offending an entire town (but providing us with gorgeous landscapes).

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