What stories can maps tell about our lives during the pandemic?

OHNY Board Member Saundra Thomas will moderate a conversation with editor Laura Bliss about The Quarantine Atlas (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, April 2022) and the largely invisible changes that COVID-19 made on our environment, documented through maps.

When Bloomberg CityLab journalists Laura Bliss and Jessica Lee Martin asked readers to submit homemade maps of their lives during the pandemic in April 2020, the 400+ maps and stories they received painted a portrait of how the pandemic transformed our sense of place. The Quarantine Atlas collects some of these stories through more than 65 maps submitted by people around the world and eight original essays. Read more about the CityLab project and see reader-submitted maps here.

Through these deeply human maps, The Quarantine Atlas visualizes the subtle and dramatic ways that the pandemic reshaped our experience of place, and the power of maps to connect us to ourselves and the people and places around us.

Purchase The Quarantine Atlas here.

Author Bio

Laura Bliss is a writer and journalist who covers cities and the environment. On staff at Bloomberg CityLab, she authors the newsletter MapLab, which explores how maps illuminate the world around us. In 2022 she published the book The Quarantine Atlas and hosted the narrative podcast series Bedrock, USA with Bloomberg Media and iHeart Radio. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Businessweek, Wildsam’s guide to California and other publications. She hails from Los Angeles and currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where she is a 2022-2023 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

OHNY Stacks

OHNY Stacks is a series of book talks exploring the unknown, the unseen, and the unnoticed. Join us on Thursday evenings with authors of highly acclaimed books critical to understanding the past, present, and future of New York—as well as national trends or global issues that influence the shape, structure, and experience of cities and urban life today.

This event will be hosted live on Zoom. Guests will receive the link to the event content in your order confirmation email, and in a reminder email before the event starts. The event will be recorded and shared with all ticket holders.