This could be dangerous...to my own amount of time spent reading things online, I mean.
I've recently discovered the "Borderlines" blog on the New York Times website, where author Frank Jacobs – as his byline says – "writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits."
As a Europe-dwelling person who likes countries and maps, I particularly enjoyed this installment: "Where Is Europe?" As in, where are the borders of the European continent, and how do we decide?
The careless way people use "Europe" as synonymous with the European Union has always bothered me (So Ukraine or Croatia don't even count as Europe now? It's bad enough that map makers often don't even include all of Eastern Europe on European maps...) but this article puts that in the larger context of what has been considered "Europe" over time – from the name's original usage for a small bit of land near the Dardanelles, to the political connotations of "Europe" being wherever the Ottoman Empire ended, through various attempts at establishing some sort of logic to where, geographically, Europe ought to end and Asia begin...and back to the politic aspect, with the E.U.
Except he explains it all much more interestingly than I managed in that summary!
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