Fareed Rafiq Zakaria is an Indian-American journalist and author. From 2000 to 2010, he was a columnist for Newsweek and editor of Newsweek International. In 2010 he became editor-at-large of Time. He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS. He is also a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, trade, and American foreign policy.
Background
Zakaria was born on 20 January in Mumbai, Bomba, Maharashtra, India, to a Konkani Muslim family. His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was a politician associated with the Indian National Congress and an Islamic scholar. His mother, Fatima Zakaria, was for a time the editor of the Sunday Times of India.
Education
Zakaria attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University, where he was president of the Yale Political Union, editor-in-chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a member of the Scroll and Key society, and a member of the Party of the Right. He later earned a Doctor of Philosophy in political science from Harvard University in 1993, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann, as well as international relations theorist Robert Keohane.
Career
After directing a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard, Zakaria became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs in 1992, at the age of 28. Under his guidance, the magazine was redesigned and moved from a quarterly to a bimonthly schedule. He served as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, where he taught a seminar on international relations. In October 2000, he was named editor of Newsweek International, and became a weekly columnist for Newsweek. In August 2010 it was announced that he was moving from Newsweek to Time, to serve as Editor-at-Large and columnist. He also writes a fortnightly column for the Washington Post.
He has been published on a variety of subjects for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic and, for a brief period, as a wine columnist for the web magazine Slate.
Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton, 1998), The Future of Freedom (Norton, 2003), and The Post-American World (2008); he has also co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books). His last two books have both been New York Times bestsellers, and have been translated into over 25 languages. In 2011, an updated and expanded edition of The Post-American World was published.
In January 2013, Zakaria wrote the cover essay for the newly redesigned relaunch of Foreign Affairs titled, "Can America Be Fixed?"
Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (2002–2007) where he was a member of the Sunday morning roundtable. He hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS (2005–2008). His weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square) premiered on CNN in June 2008. It airs twice weekly in the United States and four times weekly on CNN International, reaching over 200 million homes.
In 2013 he became one of the producers for the HBO series Vice.
Politics
Zakaria self-identifies as a "centrist", though he has been described variously as a political liberal, a conservative, a moderate, or a radical centrist.