I would read the atlas for pleasure. I knew it was weird. It was weird.

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.

There’s just something hypnotic about maps.

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

I have always loved maps.

Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors -- malleable entities like ethnicities, for example -- are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.

For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., wheres theres crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.