Category Archives: Personal

A Quick Note

01 Thursday Oct 2015

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Books

For about a year and a half, I’ve been receiving emails every so often from online advertisers who want me to hawk their stuff. This is the new wave of internet “native” advertising, where companies and online stores will pay even modestly popular blogs a small sum to publish posts linking to them. I’ve had fun telling them no.

A site, like anything else, isn’t free. To fund TBP, I’ve been an Amazon affiliate for much of this year. This means that anything you buy on Amazon — whether it’s a book linked on here or anything else in their catalog, from eye drops to high tops — will go towards supporting this site, so long as you first click to Amazon through any link on here.

This is a way to show your support for a website that’s doing something rare on the internet: giving air to evergreen ideas about things that matter. My goal — if I can, in retrospect, claim one — has never been to be a million people’s hundredth favorite blog, but 10,000 people’s favorite blog.

But that’s not the only reason to make all your Amazon purchases here.

Beyond operating costs (which go mostly toward keeping this space clean and ad-free), 20% of funds raised through the Amazon affiliate program will now go directly to fund the Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation, a Virginia-based nonprofit that’s changing the way we care for children with cancer. I sort of stumbled into teaming up with this organization early this year, and have been extremely impressed by the energy, commitment, and kindness that its members bring to what is a seemingly unbearable and unfair challenge – serious childhood illness.

A lot of charities do the necessary, elevated work of searching for cures, but these people train doctors and nurses and lobby Congress to funnel research dollars more effectively.

So, at the end of this year, a donation will be made to them on behalf of us. It won’t be a lot, but it’ll have some effect. And in January, we’ll look to other groups to support for ’16.

To learn more about the organization, please check out their website, which I built this summer, mattiemiracle.org.

As always, drop me a line if you’ve picked up a book from here or enjoyed browsing. I enjoy hearing from you: john@jrbenjamin.com.

Shop Amazon, Support The Bully Pulpit!

06 Wednesday May 2015

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Books

Whether you’ve been a reader of this blog for two and a half years or just found it today, I have a request. I want you to buy yourself a book.

It doesn’t matter what book. Could be my favorite one. Could be the one that made me laugh the most, or that one that almost made me cry. It could be that one you let your roommate borrow 8 years ago and want to leaf through again, or that other one you’ve had sitting in your Amazon cart since Christmas. Really, it’s up to you.

I’m asking because I’m now an Amazon affiliate.

This means I can earn a small fraction of any purchase made on Amazon through any link on my site. What’s more, if you want to throw in a new cell phone charger, umbrella, or some laundry detergent into your cart, I’ll get a small cut of that, too. The only thing you need to do is make your way to Amazon through any Amazon link on my site, then make a purchase of whatever you want regardless if I linked to it directly. The price of your items won’t change.

I started this site in September 2012 for a few reasons. I wanted a place to ventilate ideas that are important, evergreen, and often submerged in the day-to-day, and to hone my thinking and writing in the process. But more critical was the sense that there wasn’t a comparable website – an outlet that presented heavy ideas from history, politics, and philosophy in a multimedia-integrated, visually rich and accessible way – on the internet. I still believe that, and that intuition has been partially borne by the Bully Pulpit’s growth. I’ve never spent a minute promoting it, and The Bully Pulpit is now read by roughly 25,000 monthly readers, not including a 6,000-person email list. 93% of posts are shared on social media.

For a site that is just a daily, not hourly or by the minute, broadcast of relatively dense stuff, those numbers aren’t bad – and they keep growing. Thank you for that.

So if you care about having a resource like this (ad-free, I freely add), show your support for it by buying something for yourself and shelf. If you make purchases repeatedly off Amazon, please do them through a link on here.

And drop me a line if you do (john[at]jrbenjamin.com). I’d appreciate hearing about what book you picked up.

John

A Quick Look Back at 2013

17 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Original, Personal, Writing

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Ranch - Thanksgiving "Looking Back"

The theme threading through the next two weeks is retrospection. In these 14 days left in 2013, I’m going to post a series of glances back — to the overriding ideas and lingering questions which have taken shape in the short life of this blog. Part of my motivation here is to ventilate some pieces of writing and media which were posted months ago, before I had much of a following, and have since been unfairly neglected as they collect dust in the corners of this website. Another motivation stems from my desire to identify and describe what I see as some very definite patterns of thought which have directed my reading and writing in the 467 days this blog has been alive. While the 327 posts which have appeared during that stretch seem to have come in an unpremeditated, case-by-case way, they have in fact been related to a set of discrete subjects I only now have been able to partially identify.

So, the plan is to try to reorganize the filing cabinets and set the house in order before the new year is here.

To start, I’m going to borrow the standard mid-December lead from so many magazines and create a list of what I think are the Best Books of the Year 2013. Except this list will be for the past fourteen months, and it’ll feature every book I’ve read (and some that I’ve tried but failed to finish) along with a one sentence review of each.

Next, a look at some headlines. These are the fundamental questions which I’ve grappled with — in my spare time, schooling, and work — over the past year. These will not be subjects like “Politics” or “War” or any of the others listed on the sidebar, but rather more refined ideas which traverse those subjects and have been, for one reason or another, resonant for me throughout the past year. The plan here is to write one or two summary paragraphs about each of these ideas, synthesizing various disciplines to explain why they in particular are so vexing and compelling. This is a challenge of concision: to strain some dense subject matter through the sieve of several different disciplines, and in the process, formulate a definitive answer to the question of where I stand on each subject.

I’ve narrowed this list down to 7. They are, in reverse order of personal significance, the following:

7. War’s immortality
6. Why power corrupts
5. What makes you one person?
4. Modern healthcare is making us stoics — but not philosophers
3. How do Americans form their political opinions?
2. Is a human life a narrative?
1. Fideism

I want to give each of these topics their due. Consequently, if the holidays become too hectic, I may not be able to get to the last few before the New Year.

Finally — and this I will get to before 01/01/14 — I’m going to assemble a ‘highlights’ list for each subject I’ve posted on this year. These will be inventories of my 5 favorite works of fiction, philosophy, politics, original writing, etc. of the year, as well as a list of my 10 favorite posts of the year. Again, the point here is to summarize some major themes and bring other ignored and previously-posted works to the light of day.

So, in addition to regular posts, keep your eyes out for these looks back.

__________

The photo: I took it over the Thanksgiving holiday in New Ulm, Texas.

A Few Things

07 Thursday Nov 2013

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Screen shot 2013-11-03 at 12.55.42 PM.png
1. See me interviewed by the BBC. Tune into BBC World News or BBC News Hour Radio today to see/hear an interview with me about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination. I discuss how young people are essentially clueless about who John F. Kennedy was, how the myth of “Camelot” has clouded over the man, and why the media’s discussion of this somber anniversary is mere persiflage: a convenient use of an anniversary (always a nice journalistic peg) to open into broader and baseless musings about what’s happening today.

2. Follow me on Twitter. In honor of today’s Twitter IPO, I have put the link to my twitter page on the sidebar. I tweet about worthwhile things, rarely take pictures of my food, and also link back to important articles on this site. Follow, if you want. I will follow you back; I will be your biggest fan; I will love you forever if you do.

3. The map above is of theBullyPulpit’s site views as of this morning. 13 months. 143 countries.

New Page: Quotes

23 Friday Aug 2013

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Telephone

I’ve just created a new page where I will start keeping a list of my favorite quotes. Access it here.

They are arranged in no particular order, and, like the larger excerpts I post here, follow no specific guidelines in terms of subject matter, ideology, or speaker. The only criteria is that they each be readable in a few seconds and that they each be brilliant.

If you were to ask me which is my favorite, for a long time I would have responded — depending who you were and how I was feeling — with the cynical crack from Voltaire or the steely observation from Reinhold Niebuhr featured on the page. But now I would just echo Thomas Jefferson, who wrote (when he was 32) the perfect sentence and the foundational principle of the only revolution that still possesses any power to inspire: “All men are created equal.”

I’m not sure how often I’ll be updating the quotes page, so it’ll be accessible on the sidebar at any time.

I took the picture in an old barn outside Houston, Texas.

Who Turned the Page?

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Personal, Poetry

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Seagull in Ireland

Who turned the page? When I went out
Last night, his Life was left wide-open,
Half-way through, in lamplight on my desk:
The Middle years.
Now look at him. Who turned the page?

__________

Biography by Ian Hamilton.

As the penultimate line suggests, Hamilton seems to have written this cryptic lament for a certain stage of life — his “middle years”. But I read it now and reflect with great melancholy on the passage of a different period: the first year of post-college life. I graduated from the University of Virginia 365 days ago, and although I just recognized today as that anniversary, “Biography” careened into my consciousness early this morning and has been rattling around the back of my mind all day.

My friend D. sometimes recalls aloud — just as I repeat back to him — the epigraph of Gore Vidal’s great novel about youth and loss, The City and the Pillar.  It is the 26th verse of Genesis 19: “But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt.” This is a reference to the flight made by Abraham, Sarah, Lot, and Lot’s wife from the city of Sodom, which God is said to have smote as he commanded the four to flee without glancing back. Lot’s wife turned to look, and she was frozen mid-flight. She became the pillar.

In his novel, Vidal used this image as an allegory for the idleness and destructiveness of longing for things that cannot be regained. My friend D. usually caps this reference by saying, with quiet assurance, “You can never look back. You can never look back.” (He embodies this mantra so completely that he refuses to revisit our old college town and old college friends, despite living only two hours away.)

And maybe he’s right. I like to defiantly repeat Emile Zola’s stoic incitement, “Allons travailler!” (“Get on with it!”), but in quieter moments, I’m more often staring out the window and whispering (with equal parts disbelief, amusement, and melancholy), Who turned the page?

The picture was taken in County Kerry, Ireland.

The Gun Puzzle

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Original, Personal, Politics

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Gun

__________

As part of our final project for one of my classes, we were tasked with creating a ~5 minute video advocating for a policy that is both reasonable and feasible. My professor, Mark Rom, instructed that we make these videos as persuasive as possible, and use arguments that appeal to relatively universal political values. You be the judge of how well I did that.

The policy for which I advocate here is that of extending the current National Instant Criminal Background Check system for verifying citizens who purchase guns. In other words, it’s a pretty straightforward idea: a mere reworking of the standards that we now have in place. I’ve been working on this particular policy the entire semester, so six minutes of video can’t go into full detail as to why it’s both sensible and still bipartisan (adjectives that no longer coexist in the same sentence), but this clip should be an informative, and hopefully entertaining, introduction.

(Apologies for the sub-par sound: the microphone they gave me for voice-overs was made in 1956.)

Where This Leads

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Original, Personal

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Woods with FocusIn its seven short days of life, this blog has grown up a bit.

I’m encouraged by the messages and comments I’ve already gotten from people (from as far away as the Philippines and Brazil), and I hope to do more to attract such generous attention. I do, however, want to first lay out a plan for this website, a program for how I’d like this thing to develop, and a sketch of what you can expect here. To be clear, I was urged to make this site by my advisor at Georgetown, who informed me that, in this age of social media, if you’re not publishing yourself, or being published by others, you’re nothing. (For the record, my stuff has been published by other people. See my article in the Virginia Policy Review if you enjoy being bored to death, or just happen to be really interested in the historical and legal nuances of capital punishment policy.)

So here’s what jrbenjamin.com is for: to showcase my writing and some of the more fluent, amusing, and forceful words that inform how I think and what I write. I’m not doing this for anyone in particular. Since, unlike a magazine or channel, there is no discernable audience for this blog – and I do nothing to promote it on my own – I’m not targeting any specific demographic, party, denomination, class, ideology, subset of people or selection of the population. I’m writing and posting for whomever wants to read what I write and post: it’s a tautology.

If you don’t like my stuff, there are innumerable other voices out there, begging for your attention. If you happen to like what I say, and how I say it, then stay awhile – you can have my most comfortable chair. I want this conversation to go on.

But this is a channel for me to broadcast my work. And the basic content of this network is what I write and what others whom I admire have written, stated or created. Now the ratio of these two elements is important, and I hope to make it something like one to three. Three or so excerpts, essays, articles, speeches, videos or songs for each piece I publish. I plan to post something everyday, at least until I run out of some things. I’ll never post just to fill the space; everything on here is going to be worthwhile — at least in my humble opinion.

So take a seat, stay awhile.

__________

The photograph was taken near Sheen Falls, in Kenmare, Ireland.

Sea Dead

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Original, Personal, Photography, Writing

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When I was sixteen, I went to Israel with my Dad. When I got back, I submitted some of the pictures I had taken there to be judged in the Houston Center for Photography’s 24th Juried Exhibition, thinking it would be worth a try, knowing I had no chance of being selected among actual adult, professional photographers. Regardless, with my mom calling me downstairs for dinner, I hurriedly typed up an Artist Statement about my pictures, assembled my portfolio, and sent it in.

I woke up to find one of my photographs in the Houston Paper.

The following is the statement I wrote, the pictures I took, and the exhibition of which I was a part as a sixteen year old:

__________

Artist Statement: Sea Dead
You drive four hundred miles. Eight hours. Two days. Across desert and mountains and nothing. Four hundred miles. You check into a cheap hotel, one with a window. Maybe a balcony. Maybe a bed with a chocolate or a TV. You walk past the lobby, past the parking lot, past the pool and the lounge chairs and the people. The sky is empty; the mountains dot the horizon, far away. You take your towel and a swimsuit and a camera, you walk to the water. The water is still, the only motion comes from ripples made by some playing children. No fish or plants live here, the sea is dead, it’s sundown. Two overweight and elderly tourists bathe in the therapeutic black mud. The two children leave, the water is now still. The only motion comes from the periphery, a highway to the left, the one you drove in on, the one through the desert. Your father gets in the water. He floats. Alone in the sea, he swims delicately on the glassy surface. You climb to the top of a hill, one cleared by a bulldozer for another soon-to-be cheap hotel with TV’s and windows, you take some pictures. First of the tourists, then of your father, then the water and the orange umbrellas that sit lazily on its shoreline. You run to the sea, you put down the camera, you slowly step into the salty water. You ease yourself into the sea’s stillness, you close your eyes. You fall onto your back, onto the placid glass surface. And you float, you float on the sea.

The photographs in Sea Dead were taken by John R. Benjamin during one evening at the Dead Sea in Israel. March 2006.





How to Begin

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

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I considered how to begin.

I considered how to begin this blog. I thought about starting with something iconic and accessible, maybe a picture of James Dean lounging in faded jeans or Muhammad Ali bouncing about in the ring. I considered posting a poem by William Blake or pasting a paragraph by Saul Bellow. I thought about a YouTube clip, perhaps of a glimmer of rhetorical brilliance from Christopher Hitchens, or a measured reflection from Tim Keller, or even that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams talks about smelling the Sistine Chapel. I considered linking to Chomsky’s debate with Buckley on Firing Line in ’68, or to a song by Dylan, maybe that one live recording of Tangled Up in Blue. I considered all these things.

I considered, in other words, giving you something you could have already gotten yourself.

I intend this blog to be a place of reflection – a tiny corner of the infinite internet wilderness that’s set apart strictly for my own thinking. I intend this to be a place for collaborators, co-thinkers, contrarians, comrades, connoisseurs, and, above all, friends.

This is for those who want to disentangle themselves from the Net. This is for you, good reader, waiting whenever you want to unwind yourself from the Web.

__________

The photograph was taken at the Dead Sea, in Israel, near the Jordanian border.