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1 week ago | 
rsn.org | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
A new political era has arrived, in which the expectation and the fear of political violence are endemic.
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1 week ago | 
newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Around 2 A.M. on Saturday morning, operators manning emergency lines in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin, according to a police report, got a call from someone who said that a masked man had come to their home “and then shot their parents.” When police and medics arrived, they discovered that the victims were a Democratic state senator named John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who were alive but badly injured.
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1 week ago | 
newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Elon Musk arrived in Washington with a plan to eliminate the so-called deep state—but did it actually work? A report from inside the DOGE ecosystem to find out. And, then, confronting the epidemic of political violence. Plus:• What is Israel’s endgame with Iran?
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1 week ago | 
newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
On March 27th, Sahil Lavingia walked into the Secretary of War Suite, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, to attend an all-hands meeting of the Department of Government Efficiency. Lavingia had been a DOGE employee for two weeks, part of a small team embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So far, it had been an unexpectedly isolating experience.
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1 month ago | 
newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
In 2017, soon after Google researchers invented a new kind of neural network called a transformer, a young OpenAI engineer named Alec Radford began experimenting with it.
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2 months ago | 
newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Just after 1 p.m. this past Wednesday, President Trump posted a statement on Truth Social saying that he was pausing, for ninety days, the historically steep, economically nonsensical Liberation Day tariffs on virtually the entire world, which he had announced the week before. Retreat was inevitable.
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2 months ago | 
wired.jp | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
わたしはニューヨーク市の外れにある、大戦後に建設されたふたつの赤レンガづくりの集合住宅で育った。1980年代後半から90年前半のことだ。最初は、マンハッタン島北端のインウッドにある8階建ての一室で、寝室はふたつ。次にウェストブロンクスのリバーデイルにある12階建てに移り、寝室は3つになった。どちらも、地下にはコインランドリーがあった。 両親が親しくしていたゴードン家は、同じリバーデイルで数ブロック離れた高層住宅の19階に住んでいて、そこの小さいバルコニーから東に広がるブロンクス地区を見渡すと、わが家と同じような低層のレンガ建築が並んでいた。そこには数十万の人が住んでおり、ブロンクスの灰色の空を背景に小さな窓の灯りが見えた。 60年代にブルックリンとクイーンズに同じような建物を何百棟と建てた不動産王のサミュエル・J・レフラックは、こうした集合住宅［編註: レフラック・シティと呼ばれる大規模な共同住宅プロジェクトとなった］についてこう語っている。「必要最低限の建物です。窓は開閉できます。夏には開けて、冬には閉じるのです」...
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Mar 16, 2025 | 
newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Last Saturday evening, a recent Columbia University graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil was greeted in the lobby of his apartment building, in Morningside Heights, by four plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security. They said that his student visa had been revoked and that he was being arrested, with a plan to deport him. Khalil, a Syrian-born Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, had been a leader of the pro-Palestine protests that consumed Columbia’s campus life last year.
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Mar 3, 2025 | 
newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties in a pair of functional redbrick postwar apartments on the fringes of New York City—first in a two-bedroom in an eight-story building in Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, and then in a three-bedroom in a twelve-story building in Riverdale, in the West Bronx. Each had a coin-operated laundry in the basement.
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Feb 2, 2025 | 
newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells
On the Wednesday evening of a Washington week defined by a blitzkrieg of executive orders, vituperative confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, and an effort by the new President to suspend much of the federal budget, an American Airlines jet approaching Washington, D.C., from Wichita collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan National Airport.
