Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
- Hazing? Or just normal behavior among teenage boys?
- I have this sense that higher education is a testing ground for policies the PTB would like to apply to all of America — perhaps the world.
- Elite designer disdains the public for its (quite reasonable, it seems to me) reaction to his weird subway map.
- Are you a beta parent?
- Are Apple followers racist for wondering why the company is interested in buying Beats? And is it unfair to call Dr. Dre “the first billionaire rapper” because the characterization is based on an “identify-focused construction” (whatever that is)? What if Dre refers himself in that manner?
- Should fascist groups be permitted to participate in elections?
- We have moved one step closer to ending the scourge of ethnic cuisine.
- Finally: Atheist television.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
You know, I’m kinda in agreement with the Italian Designer. His map is based on the same principles as the London Subway map which nearly everyone else regards as a work of genius.
The people can sometimes be wrong.
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I find it hard to get past the weird blobby land masses, which don’t really correspond to anyone’s sense of New York. I get that he’s trying to foreground the subway lines and make them easier to understand, but a map that gives you an inaccurate sense of geography strikes me as problematic. Also, if he intended the smoothed-out shapes to be less of a distraction, I think he failed, because their oddness ends up being the thing you focus on when you look at it.
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But New York City — especially Manhattan — is a very different kind of city than London (or Montreal or Tokyo or other big cities with functional “diagram”-style subway maps). New Yorkers and visitors to NY often like to get around part of the time on foot, so it’s tremendously useful to have a subway map that bears some degree of resemblance to how the city is actually organized on the surface (i.e., it’s useful to have a map that works like a map). That is, part of what’s good about the NY subway map is that you can look at it and figure out that you can grab the subway to the Museum of Natural History, see the big whale, and then walk across the park to look at paintings at the Met.
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