Romesh Ratnesar is an Asian-American journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. He is the former Deputy Managing Editor at TIME

Time (magazine)

Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

 magazine, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Council on Foreign Relations

The Council on Foreign Relations is an American nonprofit nonpartisan membership organization, publisher, and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs...

.

Early life

As a child, Ratnesar attended The College Preparatory School

The College Preparatory School

The school's strict academics and small size have translated into an admissions rate lower than many American colleges and universities. In turn many students from College Prep go on to study at America's top universities, and approximately one-third of each graduating class matriculates into Ivy...

 in Oakland, CA. He enrolled as an undergraduate at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, and worked for the Stanford Daily, writing a biweekly column. He later received a masters degree in history from Stanford in 1997.

Journalist

Immediately after graduating, Ratnesar was hired as a reporter-researcher at The New Republic

The New Republic

The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

, and occasionally contributed to Slate

Slate (magazine)

Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...

, Lingua Franca

Lingua Franca

Lingua Franca was an American magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia.-Founding:The magazine was founded in 1990 by Jeffrey Kittay, an editor and Professor of French Literature at Yale University...

, The Washington Monthly

The Washington Monthly

The Washington Monthly is a bimonthly nonprofit magazine of United States politics and government that is based in Washington, D.C.The magazine's founder is Charles Peters, who started the magazine in 1969 and continues to write the "Tilting at Windmills" column in each issue. Paul Glastris, former...

, Mother Jones

Mother Jones (magazine)

Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...

, and The Washington Post

The Washington Post

The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

.

Ratnesar joined TIME in 1997 as a staff writer. He wrote more than 20 cover stories for the United States and international editions of the magazine, largely focusing on the 2003 Iraq War, global terrorism, the hunt for Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...

, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is wide-ranging, and the term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Jewish and Zionist yishuv and the Arab population living in Palestine under Ottoman or...

. He was named World Editor in February 2004, the youngest person in the magazine's history to hold that position. He was eventually promoted to Deputy Managing Editor, the number two position in the magazine. Ratnesar won the 2004 National Headliner Award for Magazine Reporting for TIMEs 2003 "Person of the Year" story on the American soldier. He also won New York Press Club awards for feature writing in 2004 and spot news reporting in 2003.

In 2009, he published his first book, Tear Down This Wall: A City, A President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War (Simon & Schuster). He left his managing position at TIME in 2010 to join the New America Foundation

New America Foundation

The New America Foundation is a non-profit public policy institute and think tank with offices in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento, CA. It was founded in 1999 by Ted Halstead, Sherle Schwenninger, Michael Lind and Walter Russell Mead....

as its Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow. He still works as a contributing Editor-at-Large at TIME.