Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein (born May 9, 1984) is an American political commentator and journalist. He has been a New York Times columnist since 2021 and is the host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast. He is a co-founder of Vox and was formerly the website's editor-at-large. He has held editorial positions at The Washington Post and The American Prospect and was a regular contributor to Bloomberg News and MSNBC. Klein has written two books, both published by Simon & Schuster: Why We're Polarized in January 2020, and Abundance, cowritten with Derek Thompson, in March 2025.

Klein rose to prominence as a blogger who became well known for his in-depth analysis on a range of policy issues. By 2007, Klein's blog had gained a substantial following and was acquired by The American Prospect, where he was an associate editor. At The Washington Post, Klein managed Wonkblog, a branded blog that featured his writing on domestic policy.

In 2014, alongside fellow journalists Matthew Yglesias and Melissa Bell, Klein co-founded Vox, a website for explanatory news owned by Vox Media. He was the editor-in-chief, and later the editor-at-large. Klein also contributed articles to the site, hosted an associated podcast (The Ezra Klein Show), and worked as an executive producer for Vox's Netflix series Explained. In November 2020, Klein left Vox to join The New York Times as a columnist and podcast host.

Klein was raised in Irvine, California. His father, Abel Klein, is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Irvine; his mother is an artist. He is Jewish. Klein attended University High School, where he was a poor student and graduated in 2002 with only a 2.2 GPA. He considered himself to be "unenthusiastic and rudderless" in high school and entertained dropping out several times. Klein attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, for two years before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, from which he graduated in 2005 with a BA in political science. His GPA in college was "better, but not substantially better" than his GPA in high school. While at UCSC, he applied to write for City on a Hill Press but was rejected. He said school was never a great fit for him academically or socially, reflecting that, overall, his exposure to the education system was "mostly traumatic".

Klein worked on Howard Dean's 2004 presidential primary campaign in Vermont in 2003, and interned for the Washington Monthly in Washington, D.C., in 2004. "The media is as effective and important an agent for change as the legislative bodies, and I think it's where I'm happiest and most effective", Klein said. In 2003, he and Markos Moulitsas were two of the earliest bloggers to report from a political convention, that of the California State Democratic Party. In 2006, Klein was one of several writers pseudonymously flamed by The New Republic writer Lee Siegel (posting as a sock puppet called sprezzatura).

On December 10, 2007, Klein moved his blog full-time to The American Prospect.

Klein's prolific blogging caught the attention of Steven Pearlstein, The Washington Post's veteran business columnist. "I was blown away by how good he was—how much the kid wrote—on so many subjects", Pearlstein said. Pearlstein sent samples of Klein's work to managing editor Raju Narisetti. A few weeks after he heard from Pearlstein, Washington Post foreign correspondent John Pomfret asked Klein to have lunch with him and financial editor Sandy Sugawara. Narisetti hired Klein to be the Post's first pure blogger on politics and economics. On May 18, 2009, he began writing at the newspaper.

In May 2011, when Bloomberg View launched, Klein became a columnist there in addition to his work at The Washington Post and MSNBC.