The Mercator projection is perfectly suited to its intended use --- maintaining angles for navigation.

That it was pushed into other usages was a function of cold war politics (makes Russia seem larger/more intimidating) and needs to be considered in that context.

Arguably, every classroom (and home with children) should have a globe.

> Arguably, every classroom (and home with children) should have a globe

Or even better is to build one. It is a lot of fun.

It is very instructive to understand why you need to shape the gores that you cut out of flat paper to stick them to the sphere. The boundaries of the gores need to curve so that there are no creases or no bits and pieces sticking out. Even then it is not going to be an exact fit on the globe, unless the flat material has some give.

One needs some interrupted equi-areal projection.

Interrupted sinusoidal is the one commonly used

https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/interrupted-sinusoidal/ (from the same site). Imagine running zipper fastners along the tears/boundaries. When one zips up one almost forms an exact sphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinusoidal_projection

> That it was pushed into other usages was a function of cold war politics (makes Russia seem larger/more intimidating) and needs to be considered in that context.

Is this actually true, or was it just done "on autopilot" because before universal public education most people using maps of the entire world were navigators for whom Mercator made the most sense?

I don't know, I just hear a lot of conspiracy theories about the dominance of Mercator. If it's not Cold War politics then it's "white supremacists trying to make North America/Europe larger and Africa smaller", and I think laziness and just going with what worked in the past is a more likely explanation.