• Gus Speth (and Me): A Call to Journalists, Writers, Researchers, and Everyone. (Substack, December 11, 2023). There’s an urgent need for a new climate realism in 2024.
• ‘While this everywhere crying’ (The Nation, December 11/18 issue). Conversations with the poet Jane Hirshfield, an urgent witness to our moment of ecological and political catastrophe.
• Cornel West: The Christian Socialist Running for President (The Nation, July 31). In an interview before he announced his candidacy, Cornel West talked church, state, prophecy, and politics.
• Risk and Revolution (The Baffler, July 20). A specter haunts the climate left. On How to Blow Up a Pipeline (the movie), China Miéville’s A Spectre Haunting, and Andreas Malm’s “ecological Leninism.”
• How to Blow Up a Climate Fantasy (The Nation, April 17/24 issue). What the latest IPCC report really means.
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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. My next book, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe, is coming from Haymarket in 2025. These days I contribute mostly to The Nation and The Baffler, and over the years, in addition to being a former senior-level editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, I’ve written for many other publications, including The Atlantic, the 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 as a friend and comrade of the Climate Disobedience Center.

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 9.2.24)