Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein (born May 9, 1984, Irvine, California, U.S.) is a New York Times columnist, best-selling author, and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show. He is one of the most influential liberal commentators in American politics. Earlier in his career Klein cofounded and was editor in chief of the news site Vox.

Early years

Klein grew up in a Jewish family in southern California. His mother is artist Jacqueline Klein, and his father, Abel Klein, is a math professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Ezra Klein went to Hebrew school, attended temple with his parents, and for a time attended a Jewish day school. He spent much of his time hanging out on the UCI campus.

“Juicebox Mafia”

Klein graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2005 with a degree in political science, but his road to journalism was circuitous. He told a UCLA alumni publication in 2020:

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I thought I’d work in politics. When I went to work on campaigns—I worked on the Howard Dean campaign for a little while as an intern—I realized I hated working on campaigns. And that is when I realized that being in politics wouldn’t work. But people in journalism liked and read my blog. The people in my life saw earlier than I did that I was moving toward journalism.

Klein moved to Washington, D.C., and began working at the liberal magazine American Prospect. In 2009, while still in his mid-20s, Klein was hired by The Washington Post as a blogger on politics and economics. Klein quickly made his mark, creating his own franchise within The Washington Post with “Wonkblog,” which brought in huge amounts of Internet traffic and garnered the attention of leading thinkers and competitors. At one point he was posting 20 items a day, and he became one of the most-read journalists at the paper. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman told The New Republic, “When I’m trying to get a quick handle on some currently hot policy, on the facts and the numbers, I very often find that I’m going to Ezra’s blog.”

Klein described himself at the time as an “opinionated reporter.” He and other young bloggers, including Matthew Yglesias, Dave Weigel, and Brian Beutler, were dubbed the “Juicebox Mafia.” In a 2011 story The New York Times called the group “Washington’s new Brat Pack” and described Klein as a “multiplatform superman of blogging-twittering-column writing.” Their work skewed toward the progressive end of the politics spectrum, and Klein’s blog was credited with influencing the agenda of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. In 2012 GQ magazine put Klein on its list of the “50 most powerful people in Washington,” at number 34.

Vox, The New York Times

Klein left The Washington Post in 2014 to found Vox, an explanatory news platform that started with a staff of 20. When he left in 2020 the staff had grown to more than 100 journalists. Klein moved to The New York Times’s opinion pages, taking his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, with him. At the time he thought about selling the podcast to Spotify and starting a Substack. “I sometimes feel like…[I’ve] left a ton of money on the table,” Klein told New York Magazine in 2024. But he added, “It’s true that I could make more money doing this independently, but if all the people who do what I do decide to go and capture all of their revenue themselves, then what happens to all the parts of the industry that are frankly more important than what I do, but are not self-sustaining in that way?” The magazine noted that what makes Klein appealing to many readers and listeners also turns off some critics: “that he makes himself a mini-expert on everything, dipping in and out of topics, from AI to wellness to the Russia-Ukraine war.”

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Calling on a replacement for Biden

In February 2024 Klein said the quiet part out loud when he called on U.S. Pres. Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. Klein considered an alternate to Biden as being essential for the Democrats to have a chance of retaining the White House. “To say this is a media invention, that people are worried about Biden’s age because the media keeps telling them to be worried about Biden’s age?” Klein said on his podcast. “If you have really convinced yourself of that, in your heart of hearts, I almost don’t know what to tell you,” he said, noting that polls consistently found that a large majority of Americans were worried about Biden’s age (he was 81 at the time). Klein predicted that “a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for this show,” which turned out to be true. Over the ensuing weeks Klein advocated for a brokered convention in which Democratic delegates could choose a new candidate. It is important to note that Klein’s call came months before Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, which happened so late in the election cycle that the kind of convention Klein had proposed was all but impossible.

“That bold and prescient move cemented Klein’s stature as a breakout media star of the 2024 election cycle, and as perhaps the most influential Democratic media figure, a place occupied over the decades by Times luminaries from Scotty Reston to Anthony Lewis,” Semafor’s media editor, Max Tani, wrote in August 2024. U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who had mounted a quixotic challenge to Biden for the Democratic nomination earlier in the year, told Semafor, “Ezra’s piece was the first crack in the dam on which I was trying to shine light, one which began shifting the mindset of the chattering class.”

Books and animal rights advocacy

Klein is the author of Why We’re Polarized (2020), which made Obama’s 2022 summer reading list, and Abundance (2025), written with journalist Derek Thompson, which, among other things, critiques Democrats for pursuing anti-growth policies through “an endless catalog of rules and restraints.”

Klein is also an outspoken advocate for animal welfare. A vegan, he penned a 2021 New York Times piece headlined “We Will Look Back on This Age of Cruelty to Animals in Horror,” writing:

How we treat farm animals today will be seen, I believe, as a defining moral failing of our age. Humans have always eaten animals. We’ve hunted them, bred them, raised them and consumed them. What’s changed over the past century is that we’ve developed the technology to produce meat in industrialized conditions, and that has opened vast new vistas for both production and suffering.