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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