Huffington, Arianna
Stassinopoulos, 1950- , Greek-American journalist
and web entrepreneur, b. Athens, Greece, as Ariadne-Anna Stasinopoúlou,
Girton College, Cambridge Univ. (M.Econ., 1972). A conservative commentator
and author, Huffington first established herself with the book The
Female Woman (1973), which argued against the Women's
Liberation Movement. She rose to national attention during her
then-husband's, Michael Huffington's, run for Senate in 1994 in California,
a race he narrowly lost. Through the '90s-early 2000s, she became a regular
commentator on television and the web, promoting conservative ideas,
although she switched allegiance to the Democrats in the 2004 presidential
race, supporting John Kerry. In 2005, she cofounded "The Huffington Post" as
a counterpoint to the conservative website "The Drudge Report." It became a
highly influential source of political news and opinion, and was the first
digital news source to win a Pulitzer Prize (2012). The site was purchased
by AOL in 2011 and subsequently became part of BuzzFeed. Huffington left the
company in 2016, when she founded Thrive Global, a company that promotes
behavioral solutions to eliminate stress in daily living; she is its current
CEO. Huffington has been named to numerous lists, including The
Guardian's Top 100 Media List (2009), and
Forbes' Most Powerful Women (2014) lists.
See her How to Overthrow the Government (2000), Pigs at
the Trough (2003), Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic
Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less
Safe (2008), Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining
Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder
(2014).
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