Posts by Benjamin

On July 22, 2021, I was spinning in some sort of time warp, relentlessly recycling my past, dizzily dreading my uncertain future grounded solely in the insight that, despite my best efforts to control or direct my own life, I wasn’t steering at all. Abbi and I just had returned from a relative’s memorial service in Miami…

Paul Cheung’s parents moved from Hong Kong to the United States when he was a baby. He met his father just once prior to being put on a Pan Am flight from Hong Kong to JFK all by his nine-year-old self. From a Lower East Side tenement to suburban New Jersey, Paul witnessed firsthand the “promise and…

Relocated from New York City, untethered from his globe-trotting day job at a major tech company, approaching a certain age and suffering from anxiety and depression, singer/songwriter Benjamin Wagner initiates a road trip to write and record his groundbreaking tenth album, Constellations. Somewhere between Nashville and Muscle Shoals, a waitress from Texas, tailor from Mexico,…

It was one hell of a Q4 for my friend, former Twitter Curation Lead, David Smydra. David has been at the forefront of assuring that tech platforms deliver personalized, high quality news by leading “humans in the loop,” journalists who bridge the gaps between editorial quality, product and audience development, and algorithmic design for more…

2022 has been an outstanding and occasionally excruciating year. Through it all, I’ve found an abundance of hope and healing in my community of friends and neighbors. I began the year committed to publishing our show once a week to crowdsource and share life wisdom from my vast network of actual friends and neighbors across…

In Finding The Secret Song, Wilmington filmmaker Ismail Abdus-Salaam explores a very specific moment in singer/songwriter Benjamin Wagner’s, life and career. Relocated from New York City, untethered from his globe-trotting day job at a major tech company, and approaching a certain age, Wagner initiates a road trip to write and record his groundbreaking tenth album…

You may not know it, but a lifetime of memories may be stuck in your cells. I’ve written dozens songs in which severe weather or dramatic accidents play proxy for the significant, unexpected and overwhelming experiences in our lives. “Natural Disaster” (from 1994’s Bloom) is about a rock slide that buries a town. “California” (from 2002’s Almost…

Last spring, on what would be the first of a dozen Friends & Neighbors documentary shoots, I sat alone in a Chicago hotel room, stuck in my newly sober body, missing my family and wondering if what I was doing made any sense at all. Ding! A text message from my friend, cellist Patrick Riley, lit up my iPhone.…

When what I thought was anxiety and depression was diagnosed as PTSD last fall, I suddenly saw trauma and its impact all around me: I noticed how little we talk about it, and remembered Fred Rogers’ oft-repeated mantra, “What’s mentionable is manageable.” And when my friend and neighbor, Senator Sarah McBride, reminded me on our…

The very first thing outgoing Online News Association CEO, Irving Washington, remembers buying with his own money was a $400 video camera for a local Indianapolis thrift store. “The big camera with VHS,” he tells me, laughing. “The one you put on your shoulder.” For “hours and hours,” Irving would “create shows” and sketch comics…