Marcus Kane

I'm Marcus Kane, and I write the Interesting Facts series here on the site.

I grew up in a small town in Montana where the public library had about two hundred books. I read most of them twice. Geography wasn't a school subject for me, it was an escape route: a way to picture Lisbon or the Atacama Desert before I'd ever left the county. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I studied Geography and Cultural Studies mostly because I wanted an excuse to keep asking "wait, why is that true?"

These days I live in Portland. I've made it to over 40 US states with a camera in the passenger seat, and I still get the same jolt I got as a kid finding out that Chile is longer than the distance from New York to Los Angeles or that Bolivia has two capital cities. I'm not a professional geographer or a travel influencer. I'm just someone who never lost the habit of looking things up twice to make sure they're right, then writing them down the way I'd tell a friend at 11pm.