Seventh Grader Spots Inaccurate Map at NYC's Met

The Hartford Courant brings us the story of a Connecticut seventh grader who very well may be all of our bosses one day.

Thirteen-year-old Benjamin Lerman Coady, the paper explains, and his mother took a trip last summer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the middle schooler peered at a map of the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century, which purported to show the dynasty at its most expansive. The problem? Spain and part of Africa were missing—territories young Coady knew belonged there because he had just completed a unit on the empire in school.

Coady went to the museum’s front desk and complained about the discrepancy, where he was told to fill out a form. "The front desk didn't believe me," Benjamin told the Courant. "I'm only a kid."

Then, in January, an email arrived. "You are, of course, correct about the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian," wrote Helen Evans, the museum's curator for Byzantine art. She invited him to return to the museum, which he did in February. He toured exhibits and got an invitation from Evans to draw what the map should actually look like. The project is pending.

The museum hasn’t decided what to do with the exhibit in the wake of the discovery, but Evans said Coady had the "makings of a young historian." The teen, however, has other plans. "I want to move to Greenwich and open a modern exotic car shop," he told the Associated Press in a follow-up interview.