Nicholas D. Kristof - Biography

Biography

Nicholas Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm in Yamhill, Oregon. He is the son of Ladis "Kris" Kristof (born Vladislav Krzysztofowicz), who was born of Polish and Armenian parents in former Austria-Hungary and who emigrated to the United States after World War II, and Jane Kristof, both long-time professors at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Nicholas Kristof graduated from Yamhill Carlton High School, where he was student body president and school newspaper editor, and later became a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard College. At Harvard, he studied government and worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper; "Alums recall Kristof as one of the brightest undergraduates on campus," according to a profile in the Crimson. After Harvard, he studied law at Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his law degree with first-class honors and won an academic prize. Afterward, he studied Arabic in Egypt for the 1983-84 academic year. He has a number of honorary degrees.

After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. He rose to be the associate managing editor of The New York Times, responsible for Sunday editions. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty, and gender issues in the developing world. In particular, since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area 11 times. He has also been a pioneer in multimedia: he was the first blogger on the New York Times' website, and he also Tweets, has a Facebook fan page and a YouTube channel. Kristof resides outside New York City with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and their three children: Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline.

Kristof's bio says he has traveled to more than 150 countries. Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker, a Harvard classmate, has said: "I’m not surprised to see him emerge as the moral conscience of our generation of journalists. I am surprised to see him as the Indiana Jones of our generation of journalists.” Bill Clinton said in September 2009: "There is no one in journalism, anywhere in the United States at least, who has done anything like the work he has done to figure out how poor people are actually living around the world, and what their potential is....So every American citizen who cares about this should be profoundly grateful that someone in our press establishment cares enough about this to haul himself all around the world to figure out what's going on....I am personally in his debt, as are we all."

Kristof is a member of the board of overseers of Harvard University and a member of the board of trustees of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says that a page one article by Kristof in January 1997 about child mortality in the developing world helped direct the couple toward global health as a focus of philanthropy. A framed copy of that article is in the gallery of the Gates Foundation.