After six years as a lecturer in law, Tunku Varadarajan left Oxford in 1993 to join The Times as a leader writer under the editor, Peter Stothard. He specialized in international affairs, law, society, and culture. In 1996, he moved to Spain as the newspaper's Madrid bureau chief. In 1997, he was named the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. In 2000, Varadarajan joined the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, under its editor, Robert L. Bartley. He worked there as a senior editorial writer, deputy editorial features editor, chief television and media critics, and, for five years, as the paper's editorial features editor In 2007, he served briefly as assistant managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, before joining New York University's Stern School of Business as a clinical professor. He was, concurrently, executive editor for opinions at Forbes Magazine, where he radically revamped the opinion section of Forbes.com. In 2009, Varadarajan left Forbes for The Daily Beast, where he was appointed writer-at-large, tasked with writing opinion columns on politics, foreign affairs, and American culture. When Newsweek merged with The Daily Beast in December 2010, Varadarajan was named editor of Newsweek International by editor-in-chief Tina Brown. In December 2012, he became the first editor of Newsweek Global, the all-digital publication that took the place of the magazine's print edition. He resigned from that job in late April 2013. Varadarajan has been associated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University for several years, most recently as the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow in Journalism. He is the editor of Defining Ideas, a Hoover Institution publication. He has also been an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism; and the Department of Journalism at New York University, where he is currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar.
Controversies
In November 2009, subsequent to the Fort Hood shooting, Forbes.com published an article by Varadarajan titled "", a play on the colloquial American phrase "Going Postal". The opinion essay prompted some controversy, including political objections from some students at New York University, where he was a clinical professor, as well as in the media. NYU President John Sexton condemned the remarks as offensive. In the article "Is Your Professor an Islamophobe?", Columbia University epidemiologist and HuffPost contributor, Abdul El-Sayed, quoted Varadarajan's article, among others, when he discussed phenomenon of "a growing number of academics using intellectual identity to promote intolerance and xenophobia against Islam and Muslims".
Personal life
A British citizen, Varadarajan lives in Brooklyn, New York, United States with his wife Amy Finnerty and their three children. He is a member of the Century Association in New York, and is on the Media Advisory Committee of AmeriCares. Varadarajan is a passionate cricket fan, and his writing has appeared in The Picador Book of Cricket. A fluent speaker of Spanish, he supports Real Madrid football club.
