Ben Adler

Ben Adler is Next American City’s federal policy correspondent, writing the Urban Nation column. He also reports on national politics and media for The Nation as a contributing writer. He previously covered politics and public policy as national editor of Newsweek.com and a reporter for Newsweek. He covered the 2008 presidential election, with a focus on voting rights and youth issues, as a staff writer at Politico. Prior to that he was editor of CampusProgress.org, a daily online political and cultural magazine, at the Center for American Progress. Ben has also been a columnist and blogger for The American Prospect and a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.

Ben writes regularly about urban and environmental issues, especially with regard to urban planning, architecture, transportation and land use policy. He was a 2008-2009 urban leaders fellow at Next American City. As a fellow at NAC he focused on federal urban and transportation policy. He also covered local issues in New York — including a cover feature on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure — and in Washington, D.C. While at NAC he won a German Marshall Fund grant to travel to write a feature about the innovations in urban planning and transportation policy in Strasbourg, France.

His freelance writing has appeared in Architect, Architectural Record, The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, The Daily Beast, Good, Grist, The Guardian, In These Times, New York, The Progressive, Reuters, Salon, The Washington Examiner and The Washington Monthly and has been printed in several books including Clued Into Politics and The Contemporary Reader.

He grew up in Brooklyn, NY and graduated from Wesleyan University. You can follow Ben on Twitter.