“The Mapparium is a three-story tall glass globe of stained glass that is viewed from a 30-foot-long (9.1 m) bridge through its interior. It is a unique exhibit at The Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, Massachusetts. Built in 1935 and based upon Rand McNally political maps published the previous year, the Mapparium shows the political world as it was at that time, including such long-disused labels as Italian East Africa and...
Read More“In this land of fire and ice, where the fog-shrouded lava fields offer a spooky landscape in which anything might lurk, stories abound of the “hidden folk” — thousands of elves, making their homes in Iceland’s wilderness. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before 21st-century elves got political representation. Elf advocates have joined forces with environmentalists to urge the Icelandic Road and...
Read More“Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel and his colleagues have estimated that invasive species cost the nation $120 billion a year. The federal government spent $2.2 billion in 2012 trying to control them and fortify the native ecosystems they trample. A new wave of environmentalists has questioned this knee-jerk vilification of invasive species, arguing that some of these creatures merely threaten an outdated ideal of...
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