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Since the advent of social media a couple of decades ago, hardly a week has gone by when I haven’t noted, often with a smirk or a shrug, some poster’s belated discovery of a long-known fact: The most commonly used cartographical representations of the world drastically understate the size of southern land masses, especially Africa, giving it an appearance far short of its true dimensions.

Now, even the United Nations seems to have caught up. With one notable holdout, the United States, a recent vote by that body to recommend that future mapmakers correct this distortion has brought this somewhat obscure factlet out of the shadows, prompting a renewed wave of online commentary.

Since the advent of social media a couple of decades ago, hardly a week has gone by when I haven’t noted, often with a smirk or a shrug, some poster’s belated discovery of a long-known fact: The most commonly used cartographical representations of the world drastically understate the size of southern land masses, especially Africa, giving it an appearance far short of its true dimensions.

Now, even the United Nations seems to have caught up. With one notable holdout, the United States, a recent vote by that body to recommend that future mapmakers correct this distortion has brought this somewhat obscure factlet out of the shadows, prompting a renewed wave of online commentary.

The cynic in me briefly objected that no measure by the United Nations can alter the conditions of life on the world’s second-largest continent or any other objective facts. Indeed, a vote such as this may not even ensure that the publishers of school textbooks and online atlases change their graphical representations of the world. But my skeptical reflexes soon gave way to a more positive sentiment.

In an era when the Trump administration has repeatedly gone out of its way to signal its lack of consideration for Africa and to demean its people as well as the continent’s large diaspora, this move toward what might be called map justice seems like the sign........

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