From a New York Times Insider column by Jeré Longman headlined “One Long Reporting Trip Around the World”:

While growing up in a small town on Louisiana’s Cajun prairie in the 1950s and ’60s, I longed to see the world. I read the National Geographic magazines that my brother received with a gift subscription every Christmas. We had Beatles albums, of course, but we also played a disc from National Geographic that featured the greatest hits of the humpback whale.

In my fourth-grade geography class, I became enamored with exotic-sounding places such as Reykjavik, Lapland and the Zuider Zee. And I wanted to know what the hell tapioca pudding was.