This story’s really short and sharp. One thing I’ve learned in the last two years of research is that we’ve been suffering from an epidemic of mappingitis for decades — the telltale symptoms is the delusional belief that some “mapping” project is “critical” even though it probably relies on Google and rehashes much more interesting work (not just an isolated showy “project”) done 1950–1975. At a social scale, one effect of mappingitis is the widespread scholarly neglect of vernacular/pop cartography, and especially its history and historiography — it just gets outsourced to pop sites like Atlas Obscura and Brain Pickings. So, for example, tour books that helped African Americans to travel safely across the US have gotten almost no attention. That’s not really surprising, though, because a lot of this “mapping” stuff is really about being white. Pity the author didn’t know that the word “dingy” — which he uses in the first sentence — was period slang for “catering to African Americans,” though. (h/t to @Molly Wright Steenson for the link)