• There’s No Quitting the Climate Fight (The Nation, Nov. 12, 2025). It’s been the worst-ever year for climate politics — but the struggle is far from over.
• Did Nepal Just Have a Revolution? (The Nation, Sept. 16, 2025). Kunda Dixit, one of Nepal’s top journalists, talks about the stunning turn of events in the South Asian nation and how its society reached the boiling point.
• New book: Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe (Haymarket, June 2025). “This is a book for anyone searching for meaning and hope in an age of crisis.” —Amitav Ghosh
• Thinking Like an Ancestor on a Burning Planet (The Nation, May 5, 2025). A conversation with Olúfémi Táíwò about the struggle for racial and climate justice in the face of catastrophe.
• Down by the River: Polycrisis Comes to Kathmandu (The Baffler, April 2025). “What’s happening along the Bagmati River—the struggle between human rights and unchecked, profit-driven growth—is just one aspect of the many-faceted crisis into which Kathmandu and Nepal as a whole are headed, like so many other places in the Global South, as chaotic urbanization, economic and political inequality, and an accelerating climate catastrophe converge.”

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a bit about me…

I’m a journalist, essayist, and … how shall we say? … engaged citizen, and I’m the author of, most recently, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe (Haymarket Books, 2025). My previous book, What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice (Beacon, 2015), traces my journey into the US climate movement during the pivotal years from 2010 to 2015. These days I’m the climate-justice correspondent for The Nation and a frequent contributor to The Baffler, and over the years I’ve written for many other publications, including The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, The American Prospect, The Boston Phoenix, Grist, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the literary journal AGNI, among other places.

In what now seems like a previous life, I took a leave of absence from the English PhD program at the University of Chicago in 1994 and somehow became an editor at The Atlantic, where I co-created TheAtlantic.com and served as its editorial director from 1996 to 2001, earning three National Magazine Award nominations for general excellence and helping invent a model of web-only magazine journalism still in use today. Later, after a tour of duty at PBS Frontline from 9/11 to the early Iraq War period, I became deputy editor and then editor of the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section in its influential early years. I even dabbled in radio, when I was hired away to be the senior/managing producer of NPR’s On Point at WBUR in Boston.

In 2010, after leaving WBUR (burnt to a crisp), I experienced something of a personal awakening and walked away from my mainstream media career in order to write and engage on climate and climate justice. As a grassroots activist and organizer for more than a decade (among other things, I was a founding member of both 350 Massachusetts and the Harvard alumni campaign for fossil-fuel divestment), I’ve supported and engaged in numerous campaigns of nonviolent direct action.

I also have a deep interest in religion and spiritual practice, with a commitment to interfaith dialogue and understanding. I guess you could say I’m a Zen Buddhist Christian, or maybe a Christian Zen Buddhist. In any case, having been brought up in a conservative evangelical church in southern California, with family roots in Texas — mostly the rural, small-town, working-class parts — I’m now an active member of a progressive Episcopal Church parish and a longtime member of a Zen Buddhist sangha. I suppose I’ve traveled about as far on the religious and political spectrum as possible in this country. Which may explain a lot about my work.

about this site…

It’s just an archive, for now. I’ll update it whenever a new piece of mine is published.

contact me…

You can reach me via Gmail at wen.stephenson.

If you’d like to receive the occasional email alerting you when I’ve published a new piece, you can sign up here.

(updated 11.24.25)