Ken Ilgunas

I really enjoyed "Prisoners of Geography" by Tim Marshall. It's a great introduction to modern-day geopolitics, which I was terribly in need of. The overall thesis is that so much of geopolitics comes down to simple geography. The good soils, waterways, and climate of France, Germany, and England help to explain their consistent hold on power. The US is not going to decline, as we always feel inclined to say, because we are in just about the most fortunate geographic position

I have an article out in this month’s Smithsonian Magazine, on a strange architectural project called “Campus Galli,” a living history open-air museum for which they’re using ninth-century tools, methods, and materials. They say Notre Dame will be re-built in 5 years. Think about an architectural project that might take 100. I volunteered there for about a week, working with the basket-maker, rope-maker, and stonemason. The longer version of this article would have included a

Today I'm on Backpacker Radio, talking about my books and the right to roam. A description from their webpage: In today’s episode of Backpacker Radio, Smiles and I sit down with author Ken Ilgunas. To put it simply, Ken is a guy who marches to the beat of his own drum. We talk at length about his time hiking the length of the Keystone XL Pipeline both where it was developed and supposed to be developed, where had to not only trespass for much of this hike, but knock on comple

With friend and fellow blogger David Dalton, I'll be, for the next couple of months, co-writing blog posts at the Into the Woods blog to review each Game of Thrones episode for the final season. Here’s our assessment of last season and thoughts on what’s to come. For this week’s entry, our impressions couldn’t be more different.

[I watch a lot of movies, and I dislike many of them, but I only feel provoked to publicly review them when reviewers seem to have their heads up their butts. (Us got 94% approval on Rotten Tomatoes.)] Jordan Peele’s Us was disappointing. *Spoilers* 1. There’s a tonality problem. My take is that Peele, the auteur, wants the film to be deeply meaningful and disturbing (meeting one’s underworld doppelgänger as a critique of modern society), but Peele, the entertainer, wants it