Fred Kaplan (journalist)

Fred Kaplan is a journalist and contributor to Slate magazine. His column, "War Stories", covers international relations and US foreign policy, with a particular focus on the Bush Administration and major related geopolitical issues.

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 often writes about jazz, hi-fi equipment and digital video for The Absolute Sound and the Perfect Vision. He once had a cat named "Bird," after jazz great Charlie "Yard Bird" Parker. He has also written for other publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and Scientific American. In the late '70s, he was the foreign and defense policy adviser to Congressman Les Aspin. He graduated from Oberlin College and has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT.

He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone (a journalist at NPR who co-hosts the weekend show "On the Media") and two daughters and a green alien named Frankie.