There must be something innate about maps, about this one specific way of picturing our world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won’t let us look anywhere else in the room if there’s a map on the wall.

People are using GPS systems to find millions of little hidden objects throughout the world - often as simple as a piece of Tupperware hidden in the woods. You go to a website, you get the latitude and longitude to get the specific location of a certain specific hiding space, and then you go there and see if you can find it.

When you make a decision you need facts. If those facts are in your brain, they're at your fingertips. If they're all in Google somewhere you may not make the right decision on the spur of the moment.

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.

Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don't have to remember everyone's number anymore, but that really wasn't a core part of my brain.

There’s just something hypnotic about maps.

We don't realize how hard it was to drive anywhere outside the major cities less than a century ago.