David A. Kaplan
American writer and journalist
David Andrew Kaplan (born October 20, 1956) is an American writer and journalist. He worked for 20 years at Newsweek, and worked for Fortune magazine for five years.
Biography
Early years
Kaplan was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, the son of Erna and Alan William Kaplan. His father was a surgeon and his mother, a clinical social worker at the university health service of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His great-great-grandfather was Adolph Bergida, a founder of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. He is a cum laude graduate of Cornell University in 1978 and the New York University School of Law in 1981, where he won writing prizes in both his first and second years, as well as the school's upperclass Moot Court Competition. During the 1994-1995 academic year, he was a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University. He was an intern with the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan and an intern at the White House Press Office during the Carter Administration, before serving as a litigator at a Wall Street law firm.
Newsweek
He had a 20-year career at Newsweek, where he wrote dozens of cover stories, as well as edited the annual Newsweek-Kaplan College Guide. Among his cover pieces at Newsweek: "The New Rich of Silicon Valley", "The Most Hated Man in Baseball", profiles of Justices Clarence Thomas and William Brennan, "The Selling of Star Wars", "The birth of Netscape", "The Great Home Run Chase of 1998", "The Return of the Hale-Bopp Comet", and "The Secret Vote That Made George W. Bush President".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “David A. Kaplan” is american writer and journalist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through David, Kaplan and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american writer and journalist” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5230488. VIAF identifies the subject as 73205393. The Library of Congress control number is n2001102450. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1978, 1981 and 1994.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
- Establishing names and roles
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Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “David A. Kaplan”, its source revision and the description used here.
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “David A. Kaplan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.