My name's Josh Benton. This is my web page. It was cool once, around 1994. It is no longer cool.

(UPDATE! I'm moving! See here.)

I live in Toledo, Ohio. I'm a reporter at The Blade, the ancient daily newspaper here. I'm a projects reporter, writing longer stories for the Sunday paper. I'm also the paper's rock and rap music critic.

I like to travel. In 1998, I went to Paris for a week (I'm a big fan of France), but 1999 was my big globetrotting year. In the summer I spent a month in the South Pacific, where I went to Pitcairn Island, the small island where the descendants of the mutineers on the HMS Bounty still live. It's the most remote inhabited place on Earth. (You can read my stories on Pitcairn here.) In August, I spent three weeks backpacking across central China, going from Chengdu (Sichuan Province) to Lanzhou (Gansu Province). Then, in October, I went to Northern Ireland to report on the peace process and to Germany to report on the 10-year anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down.

In May 1997, I graduated from Yale University, despite my best efforts to put my senior essay off until the last possible minute. There I was editor of the weekly student newspaper, The Yale Herald. I was also a part-time geek-for-hire.

Before even that, I spent my childhood in tiny Rayne, Louisiana, a mostly Cajun town just west of Lafayette, a couple of hours west of New Orleans. I went to a terrific school, the Episcopal School of Acadiana, in not-so-nearby Cade from seventh grade through high school.

Things I enjoy: college basketball, particularly the University of North Carolina; great music (Sloan, Mark Eitzel, Wilco, Guided By Voices, Liz Phair, Pavement, Velvet Crush, Prince Paul, Fountains of Wayne, Luna, etc.), reading magazines (particularly Esquire, The New Yorker, GQ, and Salon); going to Chicago; Scorcese movies; and Indian food (mmmmm...chicken tikka massala).

Things I used to enjoy: Pink Floyd (far too much, around 8th grade or so); designing web pages (back when, as I mentioned above, it was cool); staying up all night (now that I'm all of 24, it's just tiring); and academia.