Rich Benjamin

Rich Benjamin is an American cultural critic, anthropologist, and author. Benjamin is perhaps best known for the non-fiction book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. He is also a lecturer and a public intellectual, who has discussed issues on NPR, PBS, CNN and MSNBC. His writing appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian and The New York Review of Books.

Career
Benjamin's work focuses on US politics and culture, democracy, money, high finance, class, Blacks, Whites, Latinos, public policy, global cultural transformation, and demographic change.

Benjamin has been contributing essays to The New Yorker since 2017.

Benjamin's book, Searching for Whitopia, was the subject of a TED Talk that has been viewed more than 2.8 million times. The book has received coverage on NPR and MSNBC.

In 2021 Benjamin delivered the Poynter Lecture at Yale Law School on "conservatism and Trumpism in the era of digital media—on how right-wing ideology, white fear, and the digital media ecosystem threaten democracy in America."

He has presented his research on money, blockchain, and decentralization at a conference on technology.

In 2021, he served as a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Benjamin was in Princeton, NJ in 2023 for his research and teaching post as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University.

In 2023-2024, Benjamin served as a Harvard-Radcliffe Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. There he continued research on his major field of interest, high finance—the social-scientific dimensions of quants, flash trading, hedge funds, extreme wealth, and risk.

Education
As a doctoral student at Stanford University, Benjamin studied with Professors Tim Lenoir and Terry Winograd, an adviser to the founders of Google.