Benjamin Wallace-Wells

New York

Staff Writer at The New Yorker

Staff writer, The New Yorker.

Articles

What the World Learned from Donald Trump’s Tariff Week

1 week 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.
加速と豊かさを掲げた「アバンダンス・アジェンダ」はリベラルを再生するか

1 week 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」...
The Case of Mahmoud Khalil

1 month ago | 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 They said that his student visa had been revoked and that he was being arrested, with a plan to deport him.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.
Do Democrats Need to Learn How to Build?

1 month ago | 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.
Donald Trump’s Anti-Woke Wrecking Ball

2 months ago | 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.
Trump’s Attempt to Redefine America

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Cold bedevils Presidential Inaugurations, Washington, D.C., tending to be chilly the third week in January.
Why Is the Mastermind of Trump’s Tariff Plan Still Sitting at Home in Florida?

Jan 23, 2025 | newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells

One way in which Donald Trump has already imposed his fixations on the American public is that tariffs are suddenly a major political topic. During the wintry interregnum between the election and his Inauguration, Trump responded to a Washington Post report that he intended to create a new tariff of ten per cent on many foreign goods entering the U.S., a prospect that would upend the global system of trade, by clarifying that his actual plans would cover all foreign goods.
The G.O.P.’s Elon Musk Problem

Dec 21, 2024 | newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Musk, who funnelled more than two hundred and seventy million dollars into Trump’s Presidential campaign, has become somewhat ubiquitous in the weeks since the election: co-chairing a budget-cutting advisory commission called DOGE(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/16/what-will-elon-musk-and-vivek-ramaswamy-accomplish-with-doge), touring Congress, and vociferously supporting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, in Germany.
What Will Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Accomplish with DOGE?

Dec 7, 2024 | newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells

In the weeks since Donald Trump won the election, Republican Washington has been fixated on a topic that is at once familiar (for conservatives) and unexpected (for Trump): the phenomenal sprawl of the federal government and the necessity to do something about it. In the past, Paul Ryan, the anti-Trump Speaker of the House, pressed this line of thinking.
Did the Opioid Epidemic Fuel Donald Trump’s Return to the White House?

Nov 25, 2024 | newyorker.com | Benjamin Wallace-Wells

More than any drug since crack, the stories of fentanyl’s spread through the United States brush up against the edge of myth. It is a substance so concentrated that tiny amounts are said to be enough to get vast populations high: a saltshaker’s worth supplies a whole neighborhood; two truckloads keep a country of three hundred and thirty million stocked for a year. In the eighties, stories of the crack trade sometimes followed the historic maps of Black migration.