David Wallace-Wells

Author, The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” The book has awakened millions to a future that is being transformed by climate change faster and more dramatically than we realized, with politics, technology, cities, business—even our sense of history, human rights, and justice— all forever altered by its massive force. Mr. Wallace-Wells is the Deputy Editor at New York Magazine, where he writes a column on climate change, and is the former Deputy Editor of The Paris Review. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, and he is a former National Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the co-host of the “2038” podcast, which considers predictions about how our lives may change over the next two decades. Mr. Wallace-Wells’ 7,000-word 2017 New York Magazine cover essay about climate change went viral, became the most widely-read piece in the magazine’s 50+ year history, and formed the foundation for his widely-acclaimed book. As his writing drove him to dive deeper into the science of climate change, he came to realize the subject also offered a framework for the telling of a multitude of human stories. “It's an epic saga,” he says. “It's the kind of thing that we only used to see in mythology and theology. We really do have the fate of the world and the species in our hands.” Mr. Wallace-Wells attended University of Chicago, graduated from Brown University in 2004 with a degree in history, and lives in New York City with his wife Risa Needleman. (Video not available)