Happy Father's Day, everybody! Especially you, Dad. When I grow up I wanna be just like you. Your patience and wisdom inspire me. * * * When I was young my father had a copy of the Rand McNalley World Atlas. I used to spend hours looking through it, memorizing the map details, wondering how to pronounce the names of foreign cities, imagining what life was like for people living in places I'd never seen depicted on tv. I noticed how the map of world languages overlapped the map of world religions. I marveled at the population densities in east Asia and western Europe, the annual precipitation of the Amazon basin and the Congo, and the differences between where the wealth was concentrated and where the people were concentrated. I loved that book. It made my suburban childhood seem much, much bigger. It helped me realize I was a human being on Earth, not just a daydreamy kid at John C. Fremont Elementary School. Years later humanity got this fancy new thing called the Internet. It...
