Posts by Benjamin

The last time I remember really talking with my friend and former MTV colleague, Kim Thai, we were sitting in a nondescript production trailer outside of the Barclay Center at the 2014 Video Music Awards.  Kim, who, at the time, managed social media for the channel’s biggest shows, and I, who ran MTV News, often…

I left Facebook one year ago, and have spent the better part of my time since trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. Pre-pandemic, I worked at a high-stakes, high-pressure job at a company under scrutiny, in an industry under duress, on a planet on fire. I was on the road and in…

In 2014, during a window between my high-pressure MTV News job and higher-pressure Facebook one, I visited my dear friend, Jeff Domanski, in his Hudson Highlands, home some 75 miles of New York City. We kayaked and swam in the river, and watched a bald eagle devour its catch from just a few boat lengths away. The…

Matthew Tousignant and I have been hiking the rocky trails of Valley Forge National Park since we were fifteen. Tous holds degrees from Harvard University and the California Institute of Integral Studies. As a Breema Practitioner and Instructor, he combines hands-on bodywork with somatic psychology to connect people to their unique potential as human beings. When…

Like the 80 million other Americans who’ve watched since the show’s inception, I grew up wondering how to get to Sesame Street. When I discovered that my friend and one-time Mister Rogers & Me researcher, Kathy Kim, was behind the show’s first Asian American Muppet. Ji-Young, I thought, “Of course!”  And when she popped up in the studio wearing a…

For years, Tim and Amy have been sentinels, slightly-elder spiritual siblings ever-ready to provide me wise council. I have called on them confounded, confused, and crestfallen, exuberant, and downright giddy. They hold space for me to be whoever I need to be: weak or strong, brave or stupid. Which seems to me to be the…

It’s difficult to remember how little Chris and I knew when we began shooting our documentary, Mister Rogers & Me, in 2006. While Mrs. Rogers had signed off, Fred’s Company hadn’t yet granted permission. There were precious few sources of information on life and career outside of his Wikipedia page, obituary, and a few scattered remembrances. And while Chris had…

My brother, Chris, and I moved to New York City in the mid-nineties.  The rent for our 600 square foot, Hell’s Kitchen apartment was $1200. I had $400 saved in a Quaker Oats can, and a gig filing music reviews but was well shy of my cut. Still, when I landed a gig at a…

Of all the helpers who helped make our documentary, “Mister Rogers & Me,” get made, find its audience, and make its impact, few did so much so quickly and with such potent amplification as PBS Distribution’s, Amy Letourneau. Amy and I met at the South By Southwest Film Festival in 2011. Within days, she’d connected us…

There was a minute there at the end of my tenure at The Mighty Viacom when I was leading editorial across MTV, VH1 and Country Music Television. I flew back and forth between Nashville and New York City maybe a dozen times. This was just as Nashville was beginning to boom, but before the city…