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.

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

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

There’s just something hypnotic about maps.

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.

Knowing lots of answers but being a millisecond slow on the buzzer is indeed very frustrating.

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.