FLYWEIGHTS: The time has come to start saying their names!

MONDAY, JANUARY 13, 2025

Every flyweight a king: We're prepared to assume that the fellow in question actually isn't a flyweight. We're even going to say his name:

David Wallace-Wells

Right there, that's the gentleman's name—the name of the person in question.

You may not recognize that name, but almost surely, the gentleman isn't a flyweight. This is the way the leading authority on his life and his ongoing work starts its profile of same:

David Wallace-Wells

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.

So the profile begins. 

Briefly, let's state the obvious. Nothing you've read so far means that Wallace-Wells is always perfectly right in every single assessment. 

As far as we know, no one is ever perfectly right in every single assessment.  On that basis, it's safe to assume that Wallace-Wells probably isn't necessarily right every single time.

Even so, we're willing to guess that he isn't a flyweight. That said, please note this:

Concerning his work on climate change, it has on occasion been challenged, including by prominent figures. Here's more of what the authority writes about his ongoing career.

Climate writing

His best-known work is "The Uninhabitable Earth," an article published July 9, 2017 in New York magazine. Although the essay received mixed to negative criticism from many scientists, it was considered an impactful work by some reviewers. 

Wallace-Wells later turned the work into a full-length book of the same name, published in 2019. Both works are characterized by speculation regarding climate change's potential to dramatically impact human life, which Wallace-Wells describes in "meticulous and terrifying detail." 

Writing in The Guardian in 2021, Wallace‑Wells argues that the scale of climate change adaptation required globally is unprecedented, and Wallace‑Wells opines that "the world's vanguard infrastructure is failing in today's climate, which is the most benign we will ever see again."

Say what? His 2017 magazine piece "received mixed to negative criticism from many scientists?" 

That seems to be an accurate statement. Back in 2017, certain aspects of the lengthy essay were even challenged by Penn State's Michael Mann, a noted climate scientist. 

In July of that year, Chris Mooney's report for the Washington Post offered an overview of that debate. Later that year, NYU hosted a formal discussion of the matters at hand between Wallace-Wells and Mann. The videotape of that event is available online, under this dual heading:

The ‘Doomed Earth’ Controversy (2017)
The author of the controversial New York magazine cover story about worst-case climate scenarios in conversation with a prominent critic

So the process went. When the book by Wallace-Wells appeared in 2019, Mann still felt it was too "doomist." The leading authority on Wallace-Wells' book describes the matter here:

The Uninhabitable Earth (book)

[...]

In The New Climate War, the climatologist Michael Mann dedicates 12 pages to "The Uninhabitable Earth." About the book, he notably writes that "while some of the blatant errors that marked the original article were largely gone, the pessimistic—and, at times, downright doomist—framing remained, as did exaggerated descriptions that fed the doomist narrative.

So the process continued.

No one gets everything perfectly right every time. Presumably, that includes both Wallace-Wells and Mann. That said, Michael Mann is nobody's flyweight, though he's long been a punching bag for the corporate right.

Professor Mann is nobody's flyweight. Neither, we assess, is the aforementioned Wallace-Wells.

We offer this overview today for a pair of reasons. On Saturday, Wallace-Wells authored a lengthy opinion piece in the New York Times.

The column appears online. In it, Wallace-Wells offers an array of assessments about the unfolding situation in Los Angeles. We don't know if every assessment he makes is perfectly accurate—but we do feel fairly sure that the gentleman isn't a nitwit, a hack or a dope.

We feel quite sure that he isn't a flyweight! Elsewhere, though, the flyweights have been buzzing around this important topic and this cataclysmic event. 

With this, as with almost every topic, the flyweights were buzzing around with lightning speed last week. Does smoke now fill the air in L.A.? The flyweights are once again filling the air all across the failing American nation's failing attempt at a discourse.

Their names are legion, and they need to be said. Beyond that, the time has come to invent the journalistic language which would let us describe what these flyweights actually are and what it is that they do.

As we've noted in the past, we now live within a media structure which makes "every flyweight a king." We badly need to start saying their names. Also, we need to start identifying them as flyweights, which is what they plainly are.

The time has come to stop accepting the conduct of these flyweights. The time has come for major news orgs in Blue America to stop averting their gaze from the destructive conduct in which these flyweights engage on a daily and nightly basis.

As the fires have spread in L.A., the flyweights have been all over Fox News. In fairness, they've also been buzzing around other media portals. 

As a general matter, we can assume that they don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. What they do know is the corporate and tribal Storyline, along with the mandated talking points. 

Presumably, some of these flyweights know what they're doing. Presumably, some of them don't. That said, they've been undermining our failing culture for a very long time. This week, we're going to start saying their names.

High culture has long enjoyed the Flight of the Bumblebees. Our nation is now awash in the recitations of the flyweights. 

It's time for orgs like the New York times to start saying their names. It's also time to invent the journalistic language which describes who and what these flyweights actually are.

With apologies for a left-handed compliment, we assess that Wallace-Wells isn't a flyweight. All too plainly, around the clock, a battalion of others are.

Tomorrow: Wallace-Wells names Fox News