Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings has been a guest on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! but last week he appeared as a panelist. Wednesday we’ll revisit an Access Utah conversation with Ken Jennings from January. His latest book is “Because I Said So! - The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, & Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids.” Many of these myths and warnings are culture-specific. We’ll talk about the Korean “Fan Death” tale, which Jennings first encountered growing up in Seoul.
Ken Jennings also grew up as map nerd, and we’ll talk about his previous book: “Maphead - Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks,” in which he travels the nation meeting others of his tribe--map librarians, publishers, "roadgeeks," pint-sized National Geographic Bee prodigies, and the computer geniuses behind Google Maps and other geo-technologies. Jennings says that technology and geographic illiteracy are increasingly insulating us from the lay of the land around us, and we are going to need mapheads more than ever.