Bronx-born ‘climate diviner’ David Wallace-Wells explains his hyphenated background

UPDATE: Benjamin Wallace-Wells, veteran journalist at the New Yorker magazine, brother of David at New York Magazine, tweeted this tweet the other day on his Twitter feed:

"My brother's new fame, hilariously, means someone prepared an explainer about our hyphenated last name (shout-out to Mainstockheim!)"

https://t.co/Gy4vMB2BN0

PHOTO ABOVE:

''The Madonna of Global Warming'': a photo by novelist Yann Quero in France, who captioned it.

Dan Levitan, writing at ''The Outline'' website, put the global reaction to David Wallace-Wells' button-pushing climate change article in New York Magazine, where he has worked as an editor and a reporter for many years, this way, noting that the local yuppie culture of consumption magazine with a national readership "published a terrifying story outlining the end of the world as we know it. 'Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak -- sooner than you think,' read the tagline. The tale was gripping, and the [stark image on the magazine's cover[ of a fossilized human hand drove the point home: Climate change is happening, and it’s very scary. Some climate scientists took issue with just how cary, rejecting the story as clickbait. But given that 30 percent of Americans  still believe that the effects of global warming have yet to begin, maybe clickbait isn’t such a bad idea."


"Climate reporting can sometimes have the appeal of a PBS-TV special; the cover story, written by David Wallace-Wells, is what would happen if that PBS special was directed by [Hollywood's disaster porn director] Michael Bay. The piece takes us through a series of worst-case scenarios: temperatures soaring to unlivable levels, oceans suffocating nearly all life within them, and terrifying diseases rising from thawing ice and permafrost to wreak havoc on our unsuspecting immune systems," Levitan added, noting that the article had received over 50 million page views worldwide since its quiet, unannounced publication on July 9, a normal Sunday in Manhattan.
The article was read by so many people -- half of whom loved it for sticking its neck out, and half of whom criticized it for sticking its neck out too far -- that many readers wondered just who this David Wallace-Wells was and how he got that hyphenated surname.


I did some research.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE4DA133EF93AA25755C0A9639C8B63


How did the famous Manhattan ​brother journos, just a few years apart, David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine and Benjamin Wallace-Wells of the New Yorker magazine, get their last name? In his article in New York magazine, David explained some of his family background, writing a few sentences of background material, which this Jewish blogger found fascinating.

In his longform circa 10,000-word magazine article, Wallace-Wells wrote about the Jewish side of his family, noting: ''Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries — a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. My father’s, for instance: born in 1938, among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic Air Force of the propaganda films that followed, films that doubled as advertisements for imperial-American industrial might; and among his last memories the coverage of the desperate signing of the Paris climate accords on cable news, ten weeks before he died of lung cancer last July. Or my mother’s: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, now enjoying her 72nd year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the supply chains of an industrialized developing world. She has been smoking for 57 of those years, unfiltered.''

​Some people wanted to know more about the family backgorund, and so here's some background info easily accessible online. I had to do a little digging to get the details, but once I found their father Henry Wells, the family history fell into place. David wrote about his Jewish background in the famous/infamous climate piece, mentioning his grandparents coming to the USA from Germany as German Jews, so I was able to put it all together with a bunch of online clues. Then I found a paid obituary notice from the New York Times for their maternal grandfather Bert Wallace (born as Berthold Wallach in 1915 in Germany).  He changed his name to Wallace when her came to the USA in 1939.

Their mother Vivian Wallace born in 1945 married Henry Wells, born in 1938, so when the boys were born, they were given the surnames of both of their parents in a tradition that caught on in America in the 1960s and 1970s. So the boys grew up with a hyphenated last name and it stayed with them, although their parents kept their own surnames, Wallace and Wells, without combining them after marriage.

Their mother's grandfather Bert Wallace was born in 1915 in Flieden, Germany and fled Nazi Germany in 1939, settling first in Queens, New York and then in Uniondale, Long Island, New York. Their grandmother, Bert's wife, was born as Carol Lomnitz in Mainstockheim, Germany. And David's middle name is Lomnitz in honor of his maternal grandmother. 

 

And now you know...the rest of the story. David, of course, hit the global media jackpot when his longform climate article in New York Magazine went viral, and became controversial among both climate scientists and climate denialists, with over 50 million people worldwide reading the piece and over 100 reaction articles and opeds appearing in the days and weeks afterwards.

The paid obituary notice online now in the New York Times archives states that Vivan Wallace's father, Bert H. Wallace (born with the name of Berthold Wallach) was born to Baruch and Recha Wallach in Germany in 1915 and that he fled Nazi Germany in 1939, coming to America and settling first in Queens and later in Uniondale, Long Island. His wife was Carol Lomnitz, also born in Germanym the obit related, and noted that Mr Wallace who died in 2005 was survived by his daughter Vivian Wallace and her husband Henry...and his grandchildren ...Benjamin and David.

The obit ended: "An energetic participant and advocate in public affairs his entire adult life, Mr. Wallace in 1995 published 'The Rising Storm,' a richly-detailed memoir of his youth and flight from the terror of Nazi Germany's Adolph Hitler. He was a frequent contributor of letters and comments to numerous journals. "

In his longform circa 10,000-word magazine article, Wallace-Wells wrote about the Jewish side of his family, noting: ''Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries — a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. My father’s, for instance: born in 1938, among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic Air Force of the propaganda films that followed, films that doubled as advertisements for imperial-American industrial might; and among his last memories the coverage of the desperate signing of the Paris climate accords on cable news, ten weeks before he died of lung cancer last July. Or my mother’s: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, now enjoying her 72nd year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the supply chains of an industrialized developing world. She has been smoking for 57 of those years, unfiltered.''

 

So what does any of this above information have to do with global warming or David's very important article? Not much. Just a sidebar to Jewish-American history and America's naming culture for surnames and married couples and children of married couples.