• Against Climate Optimism–Because ‘Team Normal’ Won’t Save the World (The Nation, December 19, 2022). Some of us refuse to go along with a mainstream climate movement that settles for genocide.
• On the Other Side of Despair (The Baffler, September 15, 2022). Camus and the revolt against nihilism, then and now.
• ‘We’re Not Really Listening to One Another’ (Los Angeles Review of Books, April 22, 2022). A conversation with The Atlantic‘s Gal Beckerman about social media and social movements.
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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 What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice (Beacon, 2015), about my journey into the US climate movement during the pivotal years from 2010 to 2015. These days I contribute mostly to The Nation, The Baffler, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and over the years, in addition to being an editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, I’ve written for many other publications, including The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The American Prospect, The Boston Phoenix, Grist, 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, from 2004 to 2007. 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 (2007-2010).

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.

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. (Does it really matter?) 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 (Anglican) 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 3.1.21)