Author

Benjamin has been writing since his first gig as a fifteen-year-old stringer for the local Suburban & Wayne Times. He was managing editor of The Conestoga Spoke, and contributor to The Syracuse Daily Orange.

Since graduating from Syracuse University with dual degrees in Journalism and Creative Writing (Tobias Wolff led his Senior Workshop), Benjamin has been published in Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, MTV News, Mental Floss and Swing Magazine on topics ranging from politics to pop culture.

He has interviewed Bono, The Edge, Neil Young, Michael Stipe, Reed Hastings, Shepard Fairey, Douglas Coupland, Cameron Crowe, Michael Penn, David Gray, Aimee Mann and Paul Thomas Anderson, amongst others.

Benjamin contributed to the collection, "2 Do Before I Die," and wrote the award-winning 2012 PBS documentary, "Mister Rogers & Me."

Benjamin began blogging in 2000, and continues regular weekly updates via his newsletter.

He is currently writing a memoir expected in 2024.

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Feb 5 2023

In The End

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…

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Jan 18 2023

Paul Cheung: Promises & Pitfalls

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…

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Jan 7 2023

Watch “Finding The Secret Song”

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,…

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