Education

Oberlin College

English Literature and Japanese History

1990

Podcasts

30:30

32: Lawfare Blog & Nat’l Security With Ben Wittes, Lawfare Blog [Main T4C Episode]

Ben Wittes is the Editor-in-Chief and co-Founder of the Lawfare blog, an online publication dedicated to national security issues, published by the Lawfare Institute in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. It was started in September 2010 by Wittes, a former editorial writer for the Washington Post, Harvard Law School professor..

20:55

103: How to Break Into Legal & National Security Writing, Journalism & Analysis w/ Ben Wittes, Lawfare Blog [Espresso Shots]

Career Path

Interview Highlights

“I always had views, and I have no problems saying that. One of the things that I do on Lawfare is express my views. Other people express their views. Lawfare itself takes no position on anything, but I don’t have any problem with the idea that people associated with Lawfare may not be wholly disinterested.”

Best Career Advice

“Telling people what you want from them is actually an extremely valuable way to interact professionally. And a lot of people don’t do it and aren’t good at doing it. And the worst they can do is say no, and maybe they will, and that’s fine, but you shouldn’t relieve them of the obligation of saying no to you by not asking.”

Career Challenge

“Early in the history of Lawfare, when we realized that if we have this readership, we said, well, gosh, we should get the readership to contribute to the site. And we should build a document library of the entire field of national security law. We should do it on the basis of a Wiki and just have people contribute material. Wikipedia can do it. We’ve got a much smaller field than the whole world. So we should build the whole world of national security law. And we built this Wiki and nobody contributed to it. And it was completely embarrassing… And here’s the wonderful thing. Nobody remembers that we even tried it. It loomed kind of large for me because it was this great idea that I was sure was going to be a big thing. And it was kind of a mess, but nobody else remembers that we ever tried it.”