Now go a little farther

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About R&K

Roads & Kingdoms is an independent journal of food, politics, music and culture. R&K launched in December 2012 as an experiment on Tumblr, which became a home for reports on everything from Burmese civil war to dissident MCs to the perils of rancid crab. R&K is now a fulltime digital magazine, publishing longform dispatches, interviews and global ephemera every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

R&K was born, as most humans are, from a sort of fortuitous collision. Nathan was passing through Mexico after a Time Magazine reporting trip to Cuba that had started with his arrest in Havana’s Jose Marti airport, because he was a journalist with contacts to Cuban dissidents. Matt, meanwhile, was eating his way through Mexico for a mezcal-fueled feature called There Are No Nachos in Mexico. They connected at the airport in Mexico City and headed straight to Restaurante Arroyo, a sprawling barbacoa campus outside of the capital city.

That conversation there in Arroyo was what they want Roads and Kingdoms to be: it started with a lot of shit-talking about the immortal music and pustulent bureaucrats of Cuba and ended with a behind-the-scenes tour of a ridiculously good Mexican kitchen, complete with tasting of worm tacos and smoked goat wrapped in banana leaves. This is what travel can be, from Southeast Asia to Siberia to North Africa and beyond: war, politics, music, and everywhere food.

“Roads & Kingdoms”, by the way, is cribbed from The Book of Roads & Kingdoms, a great early geography written in the 11th century by Abu Abdullah al-Bakri in Córdoba, now home to a mediocre football club playing in Spain’s second division.

THE CREW

Nathan Thornburgh

Chief Editor

Nathan Thornburgh is a contributing writer at Time Magazine, where he spent much of the last five years working as foreign correspondent and editor. He’s reported on everything from cyberwar in Russia (favorite dish: solyanka) to information war in Georgia (favorite dish: khinkali) to the drug wars in Juarez (favorite dish: chilaquiles). Before getting into journalism, he was an extremely broke professional musician who most notably played with el Septeto Tipico de la Habana, at one of whose shows his girlfriend had her ass squeezed by a 92-year-old Compay Segundo. Nathan speaks four languages and can point at pictures of food on menus written in 20 others.

Matt Goulding

Chief Editor

Matt Goulding is the former food editor of Men’s Health and the co-author of the New York Times bestselling series Eat This, Not That. He published his first travel story about being the only American in a Spanish culinary school. In the decade since, he’s cooked on boats in Patagonia, worked at a carwash in Barcelona, and taught MCAT courses in the Bay Area. Mostly, though, he has worked in the magazine business, first compiling the Index at Harper’s and later covering food and travel for Men’s Health. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Food and Wine and New York. He divides his time between the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona and the open skies of rural North Carolina.

Douglas Hughmanick

Chief Creative

Douglas Hughmanick is an award-winning Creative Director/Designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent nearly a decade working on visual styling and experiences for brands like Tesla Motors, Namco Bandai Games and Facebook. Formally trained in New Media design with roots in urban street art, Doug manages to get away from the computer as well: From walking the sludge of the Stung Meanchey landfill that 2000+ Cambodians call their homeoffice, to a Grizzly face off in rural Montana to opening shows for hip hop legends MosDef and Talib Kweli as an MC; his perspective for the digital world is balanced by experiences in the real one.