Ken Ilgunas

Movies Land and Sons (Iceland, 1980) I don’t know how anyone would access this delightful little film, but I watched it on a connecting...

I listened to my first podcast in 2009, when a friend and I, on a long drive from Alaska to Denver, connected his iPod to his car stereo....

Movies Crumb (1994, USA) Crumb and his weirdo brothers make this documentary into a sort of Northeastern Gothic. I haven’t seen many of...

Movies It was a fruitful movie-watching year for me, partly because I had a lot of long flights on United Airlines, which has a...

Films Past Lives (2023, US & South Korea) - Just go ahead and give this the Oscar for Best Picture. It’s a beautiful movie about romantic...

Elena (2011, Russian) - I can’t seem to write one of these newsletters without mentioning an Andrey Zvyagintsev film. Zvyagintsev’s Elena...

I wasn’t aware that my life was institutionless until my friend, Jonathan, pointed it out. “I kept thinking of Yuval Levin’s important...

Movies The Return (2003), Leviathan (2014), and Loveless (2017) These are all Russian movies by director Andrey Zvyagintsev. These films...

Films Daughters of the Dust (1991, USA) This is one of the most surprising movies I’ve ever watched. It's about a group of...

“You’re boring!” In high school, a fellow student said this to me. “You never have anything to say!” he added. Some girls in the class...

It all started in 2021 when I got a strange email from a survival show called "Alone," inviting me to apply to be one of ten contestants...

Movies I’ve watched 18 movies in 62 days. If it was up to me, I’d be watching a movie a night, but two a week is not bad for a house...

Every ten years, the British Film Institute (BFI) revises its list of the greatest 100 movies ever. A month ago, the BFI published its...

Movies The White Ribbon (Germany, 2009) - Director Michael Haneke may be making the case that Germany’s descent into 20th Century...

Movies I have a highbrow list of movies to watch almost five hundred movies long. In the last month or two I’ve consumed — with the help...

Humans have always walked, but humans haven’t always thru-hiked. (Thru-hiking is when you hike a long trail for months.) Our species has...

The other day I asked my wife, “If I could read all your thoughts, would I think of you differently?” We were having a picnic on a...

[This is from my newsletter. Get these newsletters in your inbox by signing up on this website.] I’d hoped to knock out two of these a...

March 2022 marks the ten-year anniversary of my Walden on Wheels book deal, the thirteen-year anniversary of the creation of my blog, the...