Arianna Huffington

Long before she became a force in digital media, Arianna Huffington was Ariadnē-Anna Stasinopoúlou of Athens, Greece, born in 1950 to Konstantinos Stasinopoulos, a journalist and management consultant, and Elli Stasinopoulou. Her early life stretched beyond Greece quickly. At 16, she moved to the United Kingdom, then studied economics at Girton College, Cambridge, where she became the first foreign and third female president of the Cambridge Union. She also studied comparative religion at Visva-Bharati University in India, a country she later said had “long held a special place” in her heart.

Huffington began writing in the 1970s, shaped in part by her relationship with British writer and broadcaster Bernard Levin, whom she later described as both a great love and a mentor. Her first major book, The Female Woman, appeared in 1973 and criticized the Women’s Liberation movement and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. She went on to write biographies, including Maria Callas – The Woman Behind the Legend in 1981 and Picasso: Creator and Destroyer in 1989. Her career also touched British television, including a brief 1980 role as co-host of BBC1’s Saturday Night at the Mill.

In the United States, Huffington became widely visible during the 1994 Senate campaign of her then husband, Republican congressman Michael Huffington. In the mid-1990s she was known as a conservative commentator, supporting causes linked to Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” and Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential candidacy. She appeared with Al Franken as the conservative half of “Strange Bedfellows” during Comedy Central’s 1996 election coverage, work that contributed to a 1997 Emmy nomination for the writing team of Politically Incorrect. By the late 1990s, however, she was publicly offering liberal points of view and questioning old political categories, saying that the more meaningful divide was between those aware of “the two nations” of rich and poor and those who were not.

That shift led her into activism, media, and electoral politics. She opposed NATO intervention in Serbia during the Yugoslav Wars, co-convened the “Shadow Conventions” in 2000, and headed The Detroit Project, a public interest group urging automakers to produce cars powered by alternative fuels. In 2003, she ran as an independent candidate for governor in the California recall election and lost. She later endorsed John Kerry in 2004, spoke at Democratic gatherings, and remained a frequent voice in political commentary.

Huffington is best known to many readers as a co-founder of The Huffington Post, later known as HuffPost. In 2011, AOL acquired the site for US$315 million and made her president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which included The Huffington Post and AOL properties such as AOL Music, Engadget, Patch Media, and StyleList. She has also been recognized on Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people and on Forbes lists of powerful women, including the Most Influential Women in Media and Most Powerful Women in the World. Her career has included controversy too: two of her books faced plagiarism allegations, and for one she paid another author an out-of-court settlement.

In August 2016, Huffington stepped down from The Huffington Post to focus on Thrive Global, a behavior-change technology company aimed at improving productivity and health outcomes. Her later books, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder and The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time, became international bestsellers and reflected her turn toward well-being, rest, and wiser measures of success. That is why her words suit a quotes page so naturally. When she says, “Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success,” it sounds less like a slogan than a line drawn from a life spent revising its own definitions.