Posts by Benjamin

Twenty years ago, I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon with America’s Favorite Neighbor, Fred Rogers. That day, Mister Rogers said something that changed my life: “Deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.” In season two of our new podcast, “Friends & Neighbors,” my brother, Christopher, and I, continue the…

Friday will be my last day at Facebook. I began working for the News Partnerships Team there on October 27, 2014, following an 18 year stint at MTV News.  I joined the company for its culture: open, authentic, fast, iterative. I loved the Analog Research Lab posters tacked to the raw, open offices: Nothing At…

These days, corporate laptops come pre-loaded with desktop images and screen savers rife with slogans, logos, and acronyms: Googlicious, Six Sigma, stuff like that. Years ago, as I broadened my travels, and everything turned digital, I began tucking my own images into the System Folder: sunrise over the dew-kissed palms blanketing Elephant Mountain, or sunset…

When I was in seventh grade, I fashioned a desk from a cardboard box, placed an old, manual typewriter and coffee mug full of #2 pencils on top, and sat in the corner of the basement playing cub reporter. A few years later (predicated on a pledge to bring more breaking news to the high…

Two weeks ago Friday morning, Abbi, Maggie, Elsie and belted in for what would be our family’s first foray outside of a three-mile radius in a year, and our longest road trip ever: 675 miles on Interstate 95 from Wilmington, Delaware, to Bray’s Island, South Carolina. There — thanks to my vaccinated in-laws and their…

Discovering the kind of band with which you really, deeply connect, the kind you want to tell everyone about, used to be very, very different. When I was a freshman at Syracuse University in 1989, Rolling Stone Magazine was my Bible. The bi-weekly, smudged-newsprint magazine was still chortling along on Woodstock fumes, still prior to…

Monday’s Rockwood Music Hall Facebook Live was a love letter to my wife, sure; I recounted our 2005 meet cute in some detail and to a historically accurate soundtrack. (Mine.) But it was more than that. I was 34-years-old when we met, and well aware that whatever I was doing wasn’t working. My day job…

When my pal, Rockwood Music Hall Talent Buyer, Matt Currie, asked if I’d like to perform one of their Facebook Lives, I jumped at the chance. The date was more auspicious than I’d first thought, roughly coinciding with my first Rockwood shows in 2005. Which was also, far more importantly, the night I met my…

Dogma unnerves me: this much incense; that many Hail Marys; say this, do that; kneel, stand, pray; it positions believers as in or out, amongst us or not, righteous or otherwise. Mine is a more cacophonous faith: messier, more colorful, more inclusive. I think Bo Lozoff’s was too. Mister Rogers was a friend, and a…