Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column in Slate. The author of the classic book The Wizards of Armageddon, he has also written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT, worked as a foreign policy aide on Capitol Hill, and spent decades as a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter in Washington and Moscow. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, NPR journalist Brooke Gladstone.