Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks Read Online Free PDF Page A

babies. Boys are allowed to ride their bicycles farther than girls are—we know they explore more. These are the kinds of things that are going to increase your environmental knowledge, the chance that you can look at a map and figure out how to get somewhere.” These little environmental nudges can last allthrough life. Liben points out that even in an age when two working spouses are often equal partners in cooking, shopping, and housekeeping, the family car is the last bastion of 1950s gender roles: men nearly always drive. This isn’t true in our car—when we go someplace together, Mindy often ends up behind the wheel. Of course, that’s only because she’d rather be the driver than the one stuck with reading the map, so I haven’t exactly disproved Liben’s point.
    For her part, Mary Lee Elden thinks the aptitude gap is small enough that it can be closed with outreach. “It’s a matter of interest level,” she says. “How can we get more girls interested?” She points to the campaign, twenty years ago, to attract women to medicine. “Fifty-one percent of medical school students are now women. The big push was ‘Girls, you can do it.’ Well, I think the same thing for geography. We just need to tell the girls they can win it too.”
    The ten finalists, now all dressed in matching blue shirts with a National Geographic Bee logo, are seated in two tiers at the left side of the auditorium stage, which has been decorated for the occasion with a dramatically lit map of the seven continents set against a grid of blue translucent squares reminiscent of the Jeopardy! set. Out strides Alex Trebek to complete the game-show illusion. “These ten finalists,” says the forty-year quiz veteran, “are about to dazzle everyone with their knowledge of the Earth and everything on it and in it.” Besides the $25,000 giant check, this year’s champion will also win a cruise—not the fun, frivolous Wheel of Fortune kind of cruise, of course, but a soberly educational filmstrip of a cruise: a visit to the Galápagos Islands with Alex Trebek himself aboard! But National Geographic has judged its target demographic correctly: the ten finalists bounce excitedly in their seats at this announcement.
    After the first round, Alex takes a minute to chat with each of the contestants in turn. The mini-interviews on Jeopardy! are so cringe-inducing that many viewers TiVo right through them, but these ten kids are charming and genuine. Alex, a father of two himself, seems perfectly at ease and much warmer than usual as he chats with them. There are some signs of nerves—Vansh Jain’s little cheeks puffing inand out, Zaroug Jaleel rocking from side to side—but for the most part, the kids seem remarkably poised, with none of the unpredictable, outsized personalities I remember from National Spelling Bee coverage. All seem to have charmingly old-timey hobbies: stamp collecting, chess, archery, ballroom dancing. Arjun Kandaswamy of Oregon, the most mature-seeming of the boys, describes his Eagle Scout project, and Shiva Kangeyan blithely banters with Alex about models of World War II–era planes.
    The second round opens with a National Geographic employee wheeling out a Chinese mime made up as a terra-cotta warrior, so that Alex can ask a question about China’s Shaanxi Province. Caitlin Snaring had warned me about this.
    “At nationals, they bring out objects to distract you! ‘This is the tool they use to fork out people’s brains in Fiji!’ So you don’t pay attention to that.” The visual aids range from ancient artifacts to live animals—penguins, maybe, or armadillos. Last year, a nervous kookaburra caused some excitement by leaving a little souvenir onstage during its brief appearance.
    “Well, they use them to entertain the audience,” her mom had explained. This less sinister explanation hadn’t even occurred to Caitlin. Anything that interrupted her laserlike focus was the enemy !
    Kennen Sparks of Utah and