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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
by Andrew Jack Much hot air has been generated in recent days by the New Year’s dispute between Russia and Ukraine over gas prices. The saga has highlighted, to misquote Winston Churchill, commercial interests wrapped up in economics, and justified by politics. On the surface, the squabble looks ugly and one-sided: the great Russian bear […]
by Ben Keene Looking back at the last twelve months, the publisher’s mind reels trying to keep up with changes to borders, placenames, and shifting populations. Inspired by the multitude of year-end round ups, I decided to collect some of the most noteworthy geographical developments in a short—but incomplete—list of my own. Just to emphasize […]
Ben Keene, editor of Oxford’s Atlas program, made the circuit of NPR radio programs this week to discuss Atlas of the World, Deluxe Edition. He has appeared on Weekend Edition and Marketplace and both segments are available in the show archives. The Atlas of the World is the only atlas that is updated every year […]
The Triple Frontier, referred to as the Triborder Area by the United States State Department, has an Arab immigrant population exceeding 25,000 and is described as “teeming with Islamic extremists and their sympathizers, [where] businesses have raised or laundered $50 million in recent years” (Rother, NYTimes, 2002). A map of the area was found in […]
by Harm de Blij As a professional geographer living in Washington, DC in the 1990s, teaching at a major university, serving as geography editor on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ and working for the National Geographic Society, I dreaded the intermittent appearance of media reports on international surveys that ranked American high-school students near the bottom […]
By about 8,000 years ago the Arctic environments of North America were as extensive as they are today, and animal populations had moved northwards to establish themselves on lands and in sea-channels recently freed from glacial ice. Although ancestral Indian groups made summer excursions northwards across the tundra, probably following the caribou as Dene and […]
The passage below is from The Last Imaginary Place by Robert McGhee. Harper’s Magazine accurately describes McGhee’s book as “enthralling.” I once spent a few hours in the Ice Age. It was a brilliant July day, the sun’s heat comfortably tempered by a cool wind sweeping down from the frozen ocean beyond the ranges to […]
When the colonial powers gathered in Berlin in 1884 to finalize their partition of Africa, they paid little
heed to the religious divide that stretched across the continent from Guinea in West Africa to Kenya in East Africa. Not only Nigeria but other West African states, as well as Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia to the east, found themselves with regional-cultural contrasts fraught with problems. In the process, the colonial powers created a regional problem whose consequences they could not foresee. The Islamic Front has become a zone of conflict that threatens the cohesion of countries and facilitates the actions of terrorists and insurgents.