He received attention after writing two nonfiction works on the role of maps in the discovery of America and on Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the Vitruvian Man.
From 1995 to 2005, he worked for the American magazine The Atlantic in various capacities, including managing editor, and has contributed to several other journals.
Topics of interest have included the reconstruction of ancient Greek music, the Qur'an and alphabets in Azerbaijan.
He also looks at its place in the history of map-making from the days of the second-century Greek-Egyptian geographer Ptolemy and his treatise on geography.
He explains how, in the first century BC, Vitruvius based his understanding of architecture on the principle that it should conform to the "members of a well-shaped man" and that it depended on squares and circles.