Is Everybody Horny for Ezra Klein?

Something strange occurred this past Fourth of July weekend. The same girlfriends with whom I have previously whiled away cocktail hours debating the allure of Jason Momoa’s muscle mass and Ryan Gosling’s washboard “Kenergy” were downing our margaritas over talk of… Ezra Klein. The bespectacled, decidedly shirt-on policy wonk and host of an eponymous New York Times podcast? That’s the one. Here were the smartest, most discerning women I know, getting worked up about Klein’s gently inquisitive tone. His hyper-attuned listening skills. His ability to untangle topics that no one else can. Was it the mezcal talking, or were women hot for Ezra?

I decided to test drive the theory with a different focus group. The consensus was immediate. Kathryn C., 52, a writer in Dobbs Ferry, New York, practically swooned into the phone. “Oh Ezra, talk Gaza to me!” she text-gasped. Klein is her new marital hall pass, she says. Her 74-year-old mother is feeling it too. “She calls him her boyfriend.”

Though these days he is a married, salt-n-pepper-haired, 40-year-old father of two, Klein has been a media and politics boy wonder since he was an actual boy. In the early aughts, barely out of college, he led a wave of first-gen political bloggers known as the “Juicebox Mafia.” By his mid-20s he was running a team at the Washington Post that reportedly brought the paper 4 million page views a month. He went on to co-found media company Vox, where the podcast started out, and migrated with it to the Times Opinion section in 2021. Point is, the guy may be eternally boyish — he has always been, as one friend said, “like the cute guy you stayed up all night with in college, talking about how to make the world a better place” — but he is not some breakout star. He’s been a reliable, almost annoyingly smart source of deep context and insight into climate change, AI, the economy, education, paid family leave, you name it, for so long, it’s hard to recall a mediascape without him. Still, the current era of Ezra love burns noticeably hotter.

When the Times re-upped its headshot of Klein three months ago, lo, how the Reddit threads unfurled. Were the comments about Klein’s new “thirst trap” image featuring “tats and a plunging neckline” — reader, it’s a tasteful black-and-white of him in a golf polo — shaded with irony? Sincerity? I still can’t say for sure. But the half-inch of mystery tattoo poking saucily out from under Klein’s sleeve did intrigue. Someone wrote, “He looks like an NPR tote bag come to life.” Another commenter echoed my own thoughts: “Until I found this sub, I had no idea how many people were thirsty for Ezra Klein.”

What shall we call this fandom? Ezniacs? Kleinemanians? The ones I spoke with — and they are not hard to unearth, within a certain MSNBC-mom demo — cannot get over Klein’s almost eerie tendency to interview exactly the source they want to hear from on exactly the issue that’s on their mind. To say nothing of his willingness to go out on a limb when his more establishment-minded Opinion department colleagues will not. “He was the first one to say in a meaningful way that Joe Biden had to go,” cheers Lisa C., 60, an editor in Larchmont, New York. Remember when Klein called it way back in February — when the idea of Biden stepping down was all but verboten and, to most of us, a recipe for certain doom? Remember, too, during the national purgatory that followed Biden’s ill-fated debate performance, when Klein not-so-subtly dropped, “Is Kamala Harris Underrated?” — an episode that, among my friends at least, breathed new life into a candidate who seemed unrevivable. And in August, just as that candidate (underrated no more!) was zeroing in on a final VP pick, Klein rolled out his wide-ranging and just so likable chat with Tim Walz. It was the first time many of us had ever heard the man speak. Four days later, bingo! If I were a betting woman, I’d wager that interview helped seal Walz’s spot on the ticket.

Electoral telepathy (or was it telekinesis?) aside, the turning point in many fans’ parasocial relationships with Klein came when he addressed the Israel/Hamas conflict last October. “That caught my eye,” says Jo, 61, an organizational consultant from Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, “then, 10 episodes in, I was sunk.” At the time, any anti-Israel criticism was considered grounds for cancellation. But while Klein shared his own doubts and fears as a Jew, he also brought Palestinian suffering into sharp relief. Noting the shortage of insulin in Gaza, he said with emotion, “My wife is a Type 1 diabetic, dependent on insulin to stay alive.”

“When I have the same conversations with my brilliant, kind, wonderful husband, we end up pissed off and annoyed at one another, even if we’re on the same side. Happens every time,” says Emily S., 42, a producer from Palm Springs. “But when Ezra says it, all I want to do is go on a long walk on the beach with him and then spoon all night.”

These glimpses — never overshares — into Klein’s home life have helped him become more than just another New York Times know-it-all. Recently, he joked that listeners were getting a taste of what pillow talk is like in his house when his wife, the economist and Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey, came on to sort out a question they’ve clearly been batting around the kitchen table: Why are Americans so enraged at the economy, when we’re richer and more employed than ever? “Their vibe was pretty impeccable,” says Miller S., 50, a theater teacher in Charlottesville, Virginia. “#couplegoals.”

Impeccable is not how I would describe attempts at similar big-picture convos in my house. “When I have the same conversations with my brilliant, kind, wonderful husband, we end up pissed off and annoyed at one another, even if we’re on the same side. Happens every time,” says Emily S., 42, a producer from Palm Springs. “But when Ezra says it, all I want to do is go on a long walk on the beach with him and then spoon all night.”

In E.K. parlance, Can we press on that for a second? Why do women give Klein leeway to posit ideas and take on topics that, let’s be honest, tackled by any other man would likely elicit a heavy eye roll? Take Klein's brain-bending chat with Oxford law professor/philosopher Kate Greasley, in which the two endeavored to throw out all political notions of abortion and dig into the real fundamentals of whether — and when — it’s a moral choice. Imagine that in the hands of any other man, period. Ann F., 40, a school administrator in Jackson, Mississippi, includes the episode on the syllabus of the high-school rhetoric class she teaches: “Ezra listens to understand instead of listening to respond, which is a rarity everywhere, but especially in his line of work. To be a public intellectual of sorts and to care more about clarity around ideas than about being right is rare indeed.”

Are you listening, partners? On the couple’s therapy couch of life, Klein is not there to win. He’s there to grow. To figure it out, with us, side by side, in a journey that, given his medium (just me, my earbuds, and E.) can feel uniquely intimate. “Men can be very edgy in conversations about stuff like Gaza and Kamala,” says Kathryn C., she of the Ezra hall pass. “Like, you feel the invasion of your intellectual space. There can be a thing about winning the conversation. I think Ezra is comfortable with gray areas. He is never blaming anyone, even when he’s pointing out mistakes. He’s truly curious, not just looking to score points for what he already thinks.”

If there’s a sense among female listeners that Klein is solidly on their side — as close as a straight man can be to being one of us — it’s because, well, he just gets it. And he’s not afraid to show a little emotional leg: Take the Ozempic ep, when he recalled being bewitched by the chip basket in a restaurant — utterly unable to think of anything else, once snacks were on the table. (Been there!) Or the friendship ep, when he revealed how undone he was by a recent move across the country from his closest buddy, whom he thinks of as a second life partner. (Done that!) When Klein took (and talked about taking) parental leave for the birth of each of his sons, listeners could feel how seriously he took that time. For starters, he wasn’t there to host the show — to be conscious of a prominent man’s parental leave in that way felt rare. Plus, while he was out, he posted an epic Twitter thread on the subject. Here’s a snippet: “Men should take paternity leave because they should care for their children, and experience the love that grows out of caring for their children. To miss that is to parent (and live) in grayscale, not color.”

Because I am a hard-hitting journalist willing to risk humiliation in pursuit of truth, in the same stretch that Klein posted his interviews with Walz and Nancy Pelosi and an op-ed about Kamala Harris’ “shrinkage” effect on Trump, I emailed him about the real news of the day: Why do women love him so much? Is it the glasses? Is it the listening skills? And what’s that tattoo, anyhow? He wrote back and, as anticipated, politely declined an interview, except to say this: “My experience of myself is I’d like to be a better listener than I am...certainly doesn’t feel like an art I’ve mastered.” Does it matter if the modesty is engineered or real? It’s crush-worthy, either way.

Oh, and that tattoo? It’s on his shoulder, and “it’s of a spot in the Sierra Nevadas with a lot of personal meaning to me.” You’re welcome, Reddit.