Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
On May 12th, 2026 X user Ramin Nasibov tweeted the following fairly innocuous question: “What historical fact sounds fake but is true?”
Turns out he really hit nerve, because 1 week later over 91 million people had seen his tweet had over 2,000 replies. Here are a few of the related to Poltics:
The maps below all come this CIA album on Flicker. They describe the maps in the following ways:
CIA’s Cartography Center has been making vital contributions to our Nation’s security, providing policymakers with crucial insights that simply cannot be conveyed through words alone.
“I created a NCAA map that consists of every D1 D2 and D3 team in the country. Took me around 3 weeks to complete.”
The maps below all come this CIA album on Flicker. They describe the maps in the following ways:
The Cartography Section of General William Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) produced some 8,000 hand-drawn maps and 64 plaster topographic 3-D models in support of the war effort. Many of their products played crucial roles in the planning and execution of major military operations in the European, North African, and Asian Theaters.
And here are the 22 maps:
The map above above shows a surprising fact. Manhattan has an estimated total GDP just over $1 trillion USD but only 1,665,510 residents meaning GDP per capita is a staggering $604,619.
All of these maps come from reddit user DM_me_fun_stuff_pls who also did a survey on 24 Ways Redditors Would Divide Europe.
For these maps he explains:
The map above shows which US states have House Representatives from only 1 party as of the 119th Us Congress. Below is a full list of numbers for all states:
The map above shows how many Monarchs (Kings & Queens) have addressed a joint meeting of the US Congress throughout history, and I’m surprised how low the numbers are. According to Congress.gov: King Charles is the 11th king or queen to address a joint meeting of Congress.
The others in order are:
The map above shows what the US House would look like if it had 100k people per district vs the over 750k people per district today.
Overall, you’d have a house with 3,350 members, which in this map would mean 1692 Democrats and 1658 Republicans.
About the inserst: