PERSON: David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Columnist and Contributor

David Wallace-Wells (born 1982) is an American journalist known for his writings on climate change. He wrote the 2017 essay “The Uninhabitable Earth”; the essay was published in New York as a long-form article and was the most-read article in the history of the magazine. Wells later expanded the article into a 2019 book of the same title. At the time, he was the Deputy Editor of New York Magazine and covered the climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic extensively. He was hired in March 2022 by The New York Times to write a weekly newsletter and contribute to The New York Times Magazine.

David Wallace-Wells was born in 1982, in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, and then spent his later childhood and teenage years in Riverdale. His maternal grandparents were German Jews who fled Nazi Germany in 1939. His father was an academic and his mother worked as a kindergarten teacher in East Harlem. His brother, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Wallace-Wells attended the University of Chicago for one year and then transferred to and ultimately graduated from Brown University in 2004 with a degree in history. He is married to Risa Needleman. The couple lives in Lower Manhattan and has two daughters.

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