Ezra Klein, So Hot Right Now

She’s not about to weigh in on the filibuster, and you won’t see her hustling down the Promenade at the World Economic Forum, but Pema Chödrön, the 89-year-old Tibetan Buddhist nun, teacher and author, nonetheless has come to exercise a certain indirect sway on the American liberal elite.

The vector of her influence is Ezra Klein, the New York Times podcast host and op-ed columnist. A devoted practitioner of Buddhist meditation, Klein, 41, lately has been immersed in Chödrön’s work, in particular her 2002 book, Comfortable With Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion, which he has read several times in the past year. A hint of his approach as a journalist is right there on page 1: “May we dwell in the great equanimity, free from passion, aggression, and prejudice,” goes part of the Buddhist prayer, known as the Four Immeasurables, that serves as the book’s epigraph.

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Not that Klein has anything against measurables. The onetime blogger boy wonder, a technocrat par excellence who rose to prominence by bushhogging his way through the legislative brambles of the Affordable Care Act and later championing the unsexy virtues of explanatory journalism, is an apostle of the cross-tab. (“Greece’s Debt Crisis Explained in Charts and Maps” is one typical Klein write-up from his stint as EIC and self-styled “head vegetable chef” at Vox.) But what has arguably made him one of the most influential journalists of the moment — a nice-guy avatar of cool contemplation amid an epidemic of political fanaticism, credulity and cowardice — is his unique ability to merge the two, to plunge eagerly into the hard numbers while somehow “holding space,” as the phrase goes, for ambiguity. “A lot of Pema Chödrön’s work is about being actually willing to sit in discomfort and uncertainty, to not run away from it or hide from it, and let it do its work on you,” Klein explains in a recent phone interview. As much as we may seek certitude, he adds, the world is constantly going to surprise us. “And the only way to be an honest figure in it is simultaneously to have your own intuitions and views and also a recognition that some significant percentage of those will turn out to be wrong.”

Notes Melissa Bell, his former colleague at The Washington Post who left with Klein to co-found Vox, “By modeling healthy curiosity, he encourages his audience to be curious as well.” Times deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick, who oversees the organization’s slate of podcasts, agrees: “Most pundits traffic in certainty and proclamations, but part of what’s so alluring about Ezra’s show is that he’s rarely trying to convince you of something. He’s searching in real time for a way to make sense of the biggest questions. Ezra proves that you can be accessible and searching without sacrificing rigor or authority.”

Klein’s practice of self-doubt, his genuine curiosity, his regard for expertise and his antiquated gambit of allowing his guests to complete a thought before offering a respectful and measured response, has made him one of the Times’ shiniest stars. While his program, which also is available on video and runs six times a month, is the work of a team of about a dozen producers, engineers, videographers and fact-checkers, there’s no Ezra Klein Show without Ezra Klein. Former CNN honcho Jeff Zucker used to say the network needed to “become The New York Times before The New York Times becomes CNN,” recalls Semafor co-founder and editor-in-chief Ben Smith, noting that the paper had begun that transition in earnest. “The Times has become this incredibly important kind of television network, and Ezra is the anchor of that.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to Democratic policymakers, Klein’s influence is hard to overstate. “He is widely read by elites, by elected officials, by rank-and-file Democrats and the people who staff campaigns,” notes political consultant Lis Smith. “So when he says something, the people who make policy are usually reading and listening.” Though the Times declines to share audience numbers, Apple lists The Ezra Klein Show as the paper’s second most popular podcast after The Daily, and episodes now routinely reach well over 1 million people.

Klein’s own metrics for success, he insists, have less to do with ratings than the depth of his conversations. While his encounters with cultural figures like Brian Eno, Patti Smith and George Saunders (and soon, he hopes, Chödrön) rarely get big numbers, he says, “They’re central to what I want to do, which is to remember that the reason politics is important is you’re trying to create a more beautiful world.”

***

Nobody’s bigger than the institution. For decades, that precept has largely defined the relationship between the paper and its journalists. For every brand-name Timesman (think of Seymour Hersh or Tom Friedman), the Times has employed thousands of ace reporters who only rarely, gingerly, poke their heads out from behind the Gray Lady’s voluminous skirts. (Those inclined to do so, such as Kara Swisher, Bari Weiss and Ben Smith, tend to move on.) But Times change. “We’re in a world that’s very talent-led,” Smith observes. “Individual journalists are really important. People really connect to them.” While television has long depended on star power to woo audiences, print has been more reticent. “But with Ezra, with Maggie Haberman, [the Times has] gotten comfortable with the idea of big, big stars,” he adds. “While that creates a lot of genuinely complicated management questions, I do think they’ve ripped the Band-Aid on that in a way that others have not.”

Perhaps the more critical question is whether Klein himself is comfortable with his newfound celebrity — and the personal scrutiny that has come with it. Among his colleagues, the mild-mannered Brooklyn dad of two (married to a fellow journalist, The Atlantic‘s Annie Lowrey) has in recent years become the unlikely subject of gossip.

“People talk just as much about his personal life as they do about his editorial content,” one Times staffer tells me. Klein is seen internally as “a total success,” the person hastens to add, observing that as his star has risen, the rumors have gotten increasingly out-there and ridiculous-sounding. A former Times reporter who has been keeping tabs on the conversation agrees. “There are some genuine brand-name stars there, and he’s one of them,” they say, “so he gets extra gossip scrutiny.” Sources took pains to note that no misbehavior was alleged; the scuttlebutt was more of the, “Wow, good for him!” variety.

Klein is aware of the chatter. “I’ve heard like a million rumors around me that aren’t true, that really had traction,” he admits. “That’s been a new thing since I came to New York. I find it really weird and discomfiting. I don’t think there’s a value in trying to shoot individual [rumors] down, but I’ve been really surprised by how many things people believe about me that just don’t have grounding.”

The talk no doubt is partly attributable to Klein’s “glow-up,” as New York Magazine put it in 2024, making note of his new “salt-and-pepper beard and David Beckham-esque haircut.” Like the bookish wallflower in a teen romance who turns up at prom without her horn rims, the dorky kid suddenly looks kind of … hot?

An additional piece of West 41st Street watercooler lore holds that the lighting on the set of Klein’s show had to be adjusted to make the host a little less attractive so as not to distract from the seriousness of his subject matter. THR was unable to verify this piece of apocrypha, but the fact that it made the rounds says something about the esteem-slash-envy Klein’s success has engendered among his colleagues.

“I think growing a beard somehow changed my public perception in a way I didn’t expect it to,” Klein supposes, offering that it was all Lowrey’s idea. “At some point, two summers ago, I let the scruff grow for long enough that I moved through the awkward phase, and now I feel that I can never get rid of it.” Moreover, despite his nebbishy reputation, he is for the record a former CrossFit fanatic and longtime weight lifter. “I didn’t go through some gigantic makeover in the way people seem to think I did,” he says. “It’s an interesting retrospective burn. Like, I don’t think I looked so bad!”

The appeal is, of course, more than physical. Even before the whiskers, the website Bustle was wondering, “Is Everybody Horny for Ezra Klein?” The essay, which featured an extreme close-up of a mysterious biceps tattoo, focused less on looks and more on Klein’s intellect, his emotional openness and his (swoon …) active listening skills.

Then again, maybe it’s a side effect of the medium. “The podcast hosts I really like, I feel a weird level of intimacy toward,” Klein allows, citing PJ Vogt (Search Engine), Krista Tippett (On Being) and Pete Holmes (You Made It Weird). “I just think podcasting is intimate. Their world becomes a part of yours.”

***

Klein’s penchant for eggheaded policy discussions wasn’t always such a popular trait. Growing up in Irvine, California, one of four children of a math professor father and artist mother, he was bullied relentlessly. “I had a lot of trouble socially,” he says. “It’s tough being a kid and walking into a place every day, year after year, where the message is, ‘People don’t like you.’ “

Though he struggled with his weight back then, the real issue, he thinks, was that he was “a weirdo who liked to talk about politics all the time.” Even at UC Santa Cruz, where his bid for a spot on the school paper was famously rejected, he had a hard time connecting with peers. “Then I came to D.C., and all of a sudden everybody else was a weirdo who wanted to talk politics all the time.” There, particularly during the Obama years, his nerdy obsessions were an asset — “a reason people were interested in you as opposed to an oddity and a reason people didn’t like you.”

Well before Eli Lake dubbed Klein and the rest of the Beltway media brat pack (David Weigel, Matt Yglesias and Brian Beutler) the “juicebox mafia,” Klein was cranking out five blog posts a day, a habit he picked up in college. His takes were breezy and insidery, but even in the early days, his self-awareness was notable. “Blogs are fun. I like them,” he wrote in 2005. “But they’re a flawed and problematic medium. They encourage polarization and extremism rather than debate and understanding. They turn on snark and mockery more often than facts and agile argument.” (Meanwhile, the matter of his sex appeal was evident back then as well; when he asked readers, half-facetiously, whether the décolletage on his contributor photo was too “suggestive,” commenters were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping it.)

He was a mere 24 when, following a stint at The American Prospect, he was recruited by The Washington Post, where he created his own fiefdom, “Wonkblog,” and eventually oversaw a staff of five.

The following year, Klein’s penchant for dialogue and thoughtful conversation erupted in a mini-scandal when Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller published a series of articles about JournoList, the 400-member private listserv Klein had launched as a forum for liberal reporters, pundits and academics to kick around ideas. Overnight, what was intended as a safe space for free discussion was transformed into a target-rich right-wing hunting ground — collegial banter serving as hard evidence, or so it was claimed, that the mainstream media was the diabolical leftist cabal conservatives had long assumed it to be. Strong bagged a trophy when Weigel (caught insulting Rush Limbaugh and other conservative figures) resigned from The Washington Post, and Klein promptly shut down the forum.

The incident is never mentioned in Klein’s first book, 2020’s Why We’re Polarized. But one of its central arguments — that our political beliefs are often more a matter of social identity than ideology, much less deliberation — hinted at the way JournoList contributors appeared to sharpen their partisan rhetoric to impress their media peers.

Of course, social media algorithms, which amplify the most extreme takes, have since wildly exacerbated the problem. That Klein rarely posts (and then, almost exclusively to promote his work) makes him a rarity among pundits and may be, counterintuitively, a big part of his success.

***

After five years at The Post, Klein was feeling antsy. Wonkblog was a hit, pulling a monthly average of 2.7 million visitors, and meanwhile he was filing columns, working on his first book and appearing regularly on MSNBC, which was considering him for a hosting gig. But his experience with digital news had convinced him that the form was in need of an overhaul, and overseeing a team of his own had given him a taste for leadership. After discussions with WaPo management and various outside suitors, he partnered with Vox Media and launched Vox.com, a new site dedicated to the explainer. The idea was to merge standard day-to-day news reporting with contextual evergreen articles that would offer the sort of ground truth (“Everything You Need to Know About E-Cigarettes”) that conventional journalism assumes readers already know. (News flash: They don’t.)

Even at Vox, Klein balanced the empirical with the emotional, Bell recalls. “We spoke a lot about generosity,” she says, not only toward their readers but also the subjects of their reporting, their sources and themselves. “That generosity is a direct reflection of Ezra.”

By many measures, the site was a success, but like other new media companies of the era (see BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Vice, etc.), it struggled as advertising dollars flooded toward tech platforms. In November 2020, Klein departed for his new perch at the Times. Asked why he didn’t strike off on his own, a lucrative path for many brand-name journalists (including Vox co-founder Yglesias, who launched his Substack at the same time), Klein says he never seriously considered it. “I’ve always both believed in and enjoyed being at institutions,” he explains. “I just think that is the structure that best supports journalism broadly. And I enjoy the feeling of being in a newsroom and having a bunch of co-workers.”

It’s also hard to overstate how much influence a writer can wield when backed by one of the world’s most powerful news organs. Though no one believes Klein single-handedly forced Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election, for example, there’s little doubt his fusillade of columns and podcast episodes questioning Biden’s ability to win another campaign (much less serve), calling for an open selection process, and touting the talents of Kamala Harris shattered the numb sense of inevitability that had infected the Democratic Party.

“What was new wasn’t me saying Biden was too old,” Klein points out. “What was new was me saying that there was still something the Democratic Party could and should do about it, the argument for an open convention.” Arguably, Klein’s efforts freed up the space for officials like Nancy Pelosi to nudge the president aside. “When a lot of powerful establishment figures were saying, ‘Hey, let’s stand by him,’ having someone like Ezra Klein go out there and say, ‘This guy shouldn’t be the nominee,’ gave cover to a lot of people and made a lot of people think,” notes Lis Smith, who worked for the DNC during that cycle.

Characteristically, Klein was gentle, prefacing his first audio essay on the subject — published more than three months before the debate disaster that ultimately tipped the scales — by conceding, “My heart breaks a bit for Joe Biden,” and going on to praise the president’s wisdom, leadership and knack for coalition-building.

“The month after I wrote that piece was one of the least pleasant months I’ve had as a journalist,” Klein says now. “Because Biden then gave this pretty good State of the Union, and you know, these people attacked me. But I knew when I wrote that piece that it was going to be pretty uncomfortable, and I just sat in it.”

***

As Klein’s star has risen and his influence grown, the opportunities to sit in discomfort have multiplied as well. Abundance, the best-seller written with Derek Thompson — in many ways a sober-minded and common-sense look at how a growing thicket of red tape and other structural impediments has prevented Democrats from achieving their most critical policy goals — was taken by many on the left as a sop to corporate power. While the book is more nuanced than some leftist critics claimed, it arguably suffers from a too-narrow framing. “That book was an inquiry about blind spots among liberals,” Klein explains, noting that he felt he’d been plenty critical of Republicans over the years and said his piece about corporate influence in Why We’re Polarized. The idea, he adds, was to “have a hard and uncomfortable argument” with other progressives. “I did not want to create a book that was sort of easy to fit into people’s priors.”

Still, people’s priors aren’t always wrong, and Klein seems to have taken some of the criticism to heart. “I wish I had done another chapter on voice and distortions of voice,” he says, referring to the agenda-setting power that, thanks to Citizens United, only money can buy. “Because if we’re trying to create a stronger government capable of more aggressive action, the question of who is in the room when decisions are being made is very, very important.”

Still, he points out, Abundance seems to have helped galvanize certain pro-growth impulses on the left, drawing some buy-in from Gavin Newsom and Zohran Mamdani, among others.

If Abundance led some fans to question Klein’s left-wing bona fides, his hastily written column responding to the murder of Charlie Kirk felt to many of his liberal admirers like a betrayal. Klein’s generous assertion that Kirk — a man as famous for his intolerance as for his debate prowess — was “practicing politics in exactly the right way” won praise on the right but left many fans wondering whether Klein’s instinct for bothsides-ism, for steering deftly down the middle of the road however rocky the terrain, had blinded him to Kirk’s corrosive influence. (A more consequential blind spot may be Klein’s evident assumption that everyone in politics is as sincere as he is.)

It didn’t help that his very next episode, taped before the assassination, featured Ben Shapiro touting his new book, a belligerent diatribe called Lions and Scavengers. The rather friendly interview was preceded by an audio essay in which Klein defended his Kirk take but with a slight caveat — Kirk was doing it right “on that stage, on that day,” he specified — an indication that the backlash had made an impact. After his friend Ta-Nehisi Coates responded to the original column with a powerful rebuttal in Vanity Fair, offering a litany of examples of Kirk’s open bigotry, Klein invited him onto the podcast to hash it out. The episode was one of the show’s most popular — and also perhaps the best illustration of his “comfort with uncertainty,” as Chödrön would put it.

The sit-down was also a master class, perhaps more necessary than ever, in humility. Klein is hardly shy about voicing his opinions, but he is considerably more eager than most pundits to reach out to his opponents — not to “demolish” or “destroy” them, as we say on X, but to hear them out. “To me, the striking thing about being on the show, and also just talking to him, is he actually wants to know the answer to the question that he’s asking,” notes Yuval Levin, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, founding editor of National Affairs and a regular conservative sparring partner. “That may not sound that strange, but if you do a lot of interview-type things, it’s actually pretty unusual.”

In a political environment that’s only grown more polarized in the years since Klein first sought to diagnose the illness, it may well be our only remedy. That listening serves two goals. The first is genuinely understanding other perspectives. “That is how, in my view, I earn the right to have my opinions,” he says. “And the more I do that, on most issues, the more I’m left with at least some level of sympathy for what I’ve heard.” The second objective is persuasion. “In order for somebody to listen to you, they have to feel you’re listening to them.”

Utopian as that may sound these days, Klein is unwavering in his conviction that “disagreement and difference can operate constructively,” as he puts it, “as long as you maintain bonds of commonality.” That is not an abandonment of the commitment to “moral and social progress,” he insists. “It’s a way of actually achieving it.”

This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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