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.

I have condemned my kids to a lifetime of geographic illiteracy.

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.

As Jeopardy devotees know, if you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all. On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers, so it's just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best.

I can't relax and sink back in the couch and watch 'Jeopardy!' the way I used to.

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.

Twitter makes you a comedian in the same way that digital cameras make you a photographer