The Bully Pulpit

(This site features posts originally found at www.jrbenjamin.com)

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Dear Bully Pulpit reader, I hope you’re doing well. If you enjoyed my blog, the Bully Pulpit, which I retired in 2018, you may enjoy my writing. I write about some of the topics I used to cover on this blog (politics, current events, etc.), and have recently published thought pieces in outlets like Time, Barron’s, and The Boston Globe. I won’t bring the Bully Pulpit back. But you can follow me…

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The Other Side of Feynman

The Other Side of Feynman

“Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I…

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Fitzgerald on What It Means to Succeed Early

Fitzgerald on What It Means to Succeed Early

“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea. Once in the mid-1920s I was driving along the High…

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The Man Who Most Believed in Himself

The Man Who Most Believed in Himself

“[Franklin] Roosevelt faced formidable challenges as president, but he never doubted that he would cope with them, for he believed that he belonged in the White House. He had sat on Grover Cleveland’s knee, cast his first vote for Uncle Teddy, and seen Woodrow Wilson at close range; but the office seemed peculiarly his almost as a birthright. As Richard Neustadt has observed: ‘Roosevelt, almost…

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What ’60s Colleges Did Right “The irony is that the supposedly bland, conventional schools and colleges of the 1950s and early 1960s incubated what was perhaps the most radical generation of American citizens since the country’s founding.

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Dostoyevsky's Example of a Good Kid

Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

“In his childhood and youth he was not very effusive, not even very talkative, not from mistrust, not from shyness or sullen unsociability, but even quite the contrary, from something different, from some inner preoccupation, as it were, strictly personal, of no concern to others, but so important for him that because of it he would, as it were, forget others. But he did love people; he lived all…

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Box to the Rhythm of Your Heart “I was jiggling my shoulders as I shadowboxed, trying to get that rhythm flowing through my arms and legs… in the minutes before I would box, I was searching for that rhythm.

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The Calling of an Artist

The Calling of an Artist

“On Sunday 28 June, mid-afternoon, Jed accompanied Olga to Roissy airport. It was sad: something inside him understood that they were living a moment of mortal sadness. The fine, calm weather did not favor the expression of the appropriate feelings. He could have interrupted the process of breaking up, thrown himself at her feet, begged her not to take the plane; she probably would have listened…

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Ilium "Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall.

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Da Vinci’s To-Do Lists “My favorite gems in his notebooks are his to-do lists, which sparkle with his curiosity. One of them, dating from the 1490s in Milan, is that day’s list of things he wants to learn.

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Meet Oskar Schindler

“In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and — in the lapel of the dinner jacket — a large ornamental goldon-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door…

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Odysseus's Mind

Odysseus’s Mind

“The Odyssey is a homecoming. It’s what the Greeks called a nostos, which means a return home, and that word is very close to the Greek word for mind, nous. Both come from an Indo-European root, nos, which means a return from darkness to light. And that’s what Odysseus does, in both senses. He is hidden, for seven years, on the island of Calypso, who is really enchanted with him. She doesn’t want…

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Orwell Reflects on His School Days

“It was about a year after I hit Johnny Hale in the face that I left St Cyprian’s for ever. It was the end of a winter term. With a sense of coming out from darkness into sunlight I put on my Old Boy’s tie as we dressed for the journey. I well remember the feeling of emancipation, as though the tie had been at once a badge of manhood and an amulet against Flip’s voice and Sambo’s cane. I was…

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Teddy on How Private Secrets Cripple Leaders

“Traps were set for more than one of us, and if we had walked into these traps our public careers would have ended… A man can of course hold public office, and many a man does hold public office, and lead a public career of a sort, even if there are other men who possess secrets about him which he cannot afford to have divulged. But no man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can…

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Assume that Fortune Carries You

Assume that Fortune Carries You

“There is also a saying from Epicurus: ‘If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.’ Nature’s wants are slight; the demands of opinion are boundless. Suppose that the property of many millionaires is heaped up in your possession. Assume that fortune carries you far beyond the limits of a private income, decks you with gold,…

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The Modern World's Foundation

The Modern World’s Foundation

“[I]n the West, Christianity not only fulfilled the initial cognitive conditions for modern structures of consciousness… Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the…

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Diplomacy, Ben Franklin Style

Diplomacy, Ben Franklin Style

“In France, seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin began the third phase of his extraordinary life. His fame as a scientist and philosopher blended with the huge excitement he generated as the spokesman for the embattled new republic, the United States of America. With consummate shrewdness, Franklin wore the simple clothes of an American Quaker, an imaginary character created by savants such as…

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