The Monday Media Diet with Benjamin Buckland

On climbing, Judgement at Tokyo, and friend of WITI Patrick Radden Keefe

Ben Buckland (BB) is a writer and a freelance photographer for human rights, humanitarian and nature conservation organizations. Thanks to Kelly B. for the introduction to his work. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I always thought my life was just a smoldering mess of random stuff I like. And then Kelly Berold told me I had a “portfolio career” so I’m going with that. 

I’m a writer (my most recent thing for the New York Times here) and a freelance photographer for human rights, humanitarian and nature conservation organizations around the world. I’m also a kind of small time adventurer, explorer, climber and alpinist. And I have also had a long career in criminal justice reform and detention oversight, all over the place. If you want to know which are the worst prisons on earth, I’ve likely been there. 

Mostly I am just curious. About pretty much everything. 

Describe your media diet. 

I made a conscious decision a few years ago to stop reading the news. Every year I write a new intention at the start of my diary and a few years ago it was: “what is worthy of our attention?” I think a lot about that. About how much time we have and what we spend it on. I think news it is important but I also felt like knowing what is happening hour by hour was maybe not the best use of my remaining days on earth. So I refocused a lot of my media diet on reading history. Eclectic stuff. But it has felt like I’m slowly piecing together a better understanding of things than I was when reading the minute by minute report on Trump’s latest rally. 

Having said that I still read the New Yorker every week. And if I’m at home on a weekend I get the FT and spread the pages all over the breakfast table. 

What’s the last great book you read?

My brilliant friend Jean Edelstein just sent me a draft of her new memoir. It is called Breasts. It is in three parts: sex, food and cancer. And it is incredibly moving and sad and funny and absolutely a book everyone should read. It will be out in March 2025. Put it in your diary. You’ll read it in a sitting and it will change you. 

What are you reading now?

I always have a half dozen things on the go. In the non-fiction pile are the weighty Judgement at Tokyo and the brutal and tragic Some People Need Killing. I’m also reading Olivia Laing’s first book To the River, in which she walks the length of the Ouse, in which Virginia Woolf drowned. It is lyrical and personal and wonderful. At the top of the fiction pile is Francis Spufford’s new novel Cahokia Jazz. I know him from his charming memoir The Child That Books Built and his bonkers history of polar exploration I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination but he has gone in a totally different direction with this. Alternative history meets rowdy detective fiction. It is wild. A shoutout as well to Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, which feels like the perfect 2024 summer read. At once very funny, very dark, and very, very now. 

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favourite publication?

I go first by bylines. If there is something by Nathan Heller, Patrick Radden Keefe or Bill Finnegan in the New Yorker I’ll likely read that first. But otherwise, I’ll flip around and read the gems – often the FT book reviews, new gallery shows and performances – and then slowly work my way back through the things I feel like I should know. The media diet equivalent of starting dinner with dessert, essentially.

Otherwise I’m a total New York Times Crossword addict. A friend and I text each other our completion times on the full puzzle daily. Like a bunch of shameless nerds. I am hoping this makes me super popular in an old people’s home one day. 

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I don’t know what other people aren’t reading but whatever. Everyone should read Barry Lopez. Arctic Dreams is a masterpiece. His ability to zoom in on the details of the moment he is living. And then out to the huge and the wonder of the landscape is extraordinary. He’d be a fucking saint in any church I’d consider joining. 

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

I am from Tasmania but I became Swiss a year ago and the government referendum app is a work of weird art. Every vote (multiple topics, three times a year) comes with a “neutral summary of the issue” in the app. Whoever writes that is an unsung hero of democracy and tightly written prose. Threading the impossible needle of partisanship to state – very simply – the reasonable pros and cons of everything to be voted on. It is the most Swiss thing ever. I love it. 

Plane or train?

Does everyone say train these days? Years ago, I travelled all the way from Hong Kong to Switzerland by train. And also the whole way in the other direction, from the Netherlands to Australia across the Middle East and Asia (with some buses, boats and bikes thrown in). I love trains. Swiss rail dining cars, in particular, are little islands of fast moving civilisation.

But I think it is more about how you approach them that’s important. Planes can be great spaces for thinking. Especially the airlines that thankfully don’t have WiFi. When you just have a huge block of unbroken time when you can’t faff around on the internet and can really pay attention to something. 

Anywhere can be a good time if you make it so. 

What is one place everyone should visit? 

Everyone should go somewhere really wild someday. I think in much of the world we have forgotten what biodiversity looks like. How much life this planet can support when we really leave it alone to go nuts. Places like the Okavango Delta. The Galapagos. The Amazon. Svalbard. Tasmania. Madagascar. Places where the wild is fucking cranking.  Where you can’t move for other living things. Just to remind ourselves that everywhere was like that. Could be more like that. If we tried a little harder. 

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into. 

I’ve been working on a series of photo and written essays called “24 hours in the life of a city” in which I try to find,  photograph and write about 24 people:  one person at each hour of the day and night who represents at that moment a different aspect of the city in all it’s diversity. It was inspired a little by Colin Jones’s mad book The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris which I read this year. And which really taught me how deep you can go somewhere if you really dig down. And the kinds of unexpected adventures you can have, and stories you can find, even in supposedly “ordinary” places. Rabbit holes are everywhere, in other words, we just need to start digging. (BB)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Ben (BB)

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