New Weblog Feature: Ben’s Place of the Week

One of the pleasures of editing an online magazine is hearing from people all over the world, including those we write about. After we linked to a recent interview with Oxford “Atlas of the World” editor Ben Keene, we were delighted to receive an e-mail from him. But Ben didn’t just say hi; he proposed a new weblog feature for World Hum.

“I’ve been an enthusiastic reader of World Hum for about a year now,” he wrote. “I have been sending a weekly e-mail to a steadily growing list of subscribers that I call Ben’s Place of the Week. I describe a strange, interesting, or newsworthy location in an attempt to generate in some small way a greater awareness and better appreciation of our tiny blue planet.” Ben included an example of these e-mails: a three-sentence piece about an Indonesian island where scientists have discovered fossils belonging to a new species of tiny people. It was a wonderful, brief glimpse into a part of the world we knew little about—the travel editorial equivalent of a sharply written postcard. Ben suggested we post his newest item on our weblog each week. We loved the idea.

In an article for geography teachers, Ben described what he does this way:

As most readers already know, geography isn’t just about places, and my short messages are meant to make you stop and think deeper: to consider the environment, society, notions of space and the relationships between them. Perhaps they’ll stimulate conversations, or debates, and hopefully you’ll pause to glance up at the yellowing map on your wall or to pull down an old, dog-eared atlas from your bookshelf.

Ben isn’t a cartographer, and he studied anthropology in college, not geography. He’s a map-lover and avid traveler who works on some of the most respected atlases in the world and wants to share a bit of his passion with readers. We’re happy to oblige and bring you, each Friday beginning today, Ben’s Place of the Week.

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