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Ken Jennings on Wednesday's Access Utah

Jeopardy! champion & author Ken Jennings
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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.

Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.