Ken Ilgunas

I have a hunch that This Land Is Our Land will be viciously attacked. This hunch comes from two places: 1. A review of my book by National Parks Traveler, a website devoted to covering issues related to parks; and, 2. My Backpacker Magazine article on Scotland’s right to roam. The review was positive and I was happy with how the Backpacker article turned out, but it was in the Facebook comment sections for these articles where my ideas were angrily dismissed and I was persona

My piece in Backpacker Magazine ran last week. It’s part of their “public lands” issue, so the article has as much to do with my Scottish hike as the public lands situation in America. The photos below are from my hike, from Inverie to Fort William.

During the Bills-Jaguars playoff game last week, two Bills players went down with head injuries. When I watched football years ago, an injury timeout was a bathroom break. Now it’s a lump in my throat. Head injuries, and what we now know about head injuries, have changed the way I watch the game. Each time a running back gets stood up at the line, I see CTE. Each time a receiver goes up for a ball, I see CTE. Each time the ball is snapped, I see CTE. CTE, or chronic traumatic

I’m not so arrogant to think that I’ll have a reader in the distant future. After all, getting read in the present is hard enough. Still, if just out principle, I aspire to be in the good graces of tomorrow’s readers, as I live far more in fear of being called “backwards” by the future reader than “crazy” by the modern. It’s a reasonable fear. There are countless examples of slaveholders, racists, anti-suffragists, and others who, to our modern eyes, seem like intellectual du

I’ve been doing a “year in review” for the past five years or so. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed writing them and how much I’ve benefited from them. They help me focus on the future, make plans, think about long-term goals, and reflect on the arc of my life. Plus, they’re just a great way to chronicle and document your life, which will make for fascinating and pleasurable future reading. I wrote a longer entry about writing year-in-reviews a few years back. In th

I wanted this book to go on and on. I’m a nut for presidential biographies, and this is one of the best… Washington was a flawed man in many ways: In his early years, he was unbecomingly ambitious. He obsessed over his dress, and he would not-so-subtly elbow his way into the lives of the rich and powerful with the hope of elevating his station. His ascent into greatness had as much to do with his qualities as a person as the fortuitous deaths of his relatives, who passed onto