Fred Kaplan

Fred Kaplan is a journalist and contributor to Slate magazine. His "War Stories" column covers international relations and US foreign policy.

Career

Kaplan is a native of Hutchinson, Kansas, and graduated from Oberlin College and has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. In the late 1970s, he was the foreign and defense policy adviser to Congressman Les Aspin.

Prior to writing for Slate, Kaplan was a correspondent at the Boston Globe, reporting from Washington DC, Moscow, and New York City. He was a member of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for a special Sunday Boston Globe Magazine on the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race. His 1983 book on the men who invented nuclear strategy, The Wizards of Armageddon, won the Washington Monthly Political Book of the Year award.

He has also written for other publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Scientific American.

In early 2008 he published Daydream Believers, which discusses the Bush Administration's use of Cold War tactics in post 9/11 actions. In the book he explores why the administration has pursued policies he believes to be unilateral action and pre-emptive warfare.

In 2009, he published 1959: The Year Everything Changed.

Kaplan is of no relation to journalist Robert D. Kaplan.

Audio/video

Kaplan is an enthusiast of high-end audio and video equipment, and has reported from the Consumer Electronics Show on new technologies in this area, as well as penning shopping-advice columns on what sorts of new TVs offer the best value.

He often writes about jazz and hi-fi equipment for Stereophile.

Family

He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone, a journalist with NPR who co-hosts the weekend show On the Media, and their twin daughters.

External links

• Fred Kaplan's official jazz blog
• Fred Kaplan's website
• Archive of stories at Slate by Kaplan
• Kaplan interview with NPR about Daydream Believers
• Video (and audio) of interview/discussion with Fred Kaplan by Robert Wright on Bloggingheads.tv