Ken Auletta | |
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 (CC) JD Lasica | |
| Born | April 23, 1942 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | writer, journalist |
| Spouse | Amanda Urban |
Kenneth B. Auletta (born April 23, 1942) [1] is an American author, a political columnist for the New York Daily News, [2] and media critic for The New Yorker .
The son of an Italian American father and a Jewish American mother, Auletta grew up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Abraham Lincoln High School. [3] He graduated from the State University of New York at Oswego and received his M.A. in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. [4]
While in graduate school, Auletta taught and trained Peace Corps volunteers.[ citation needed ] He "got bored in a Ph.D political science program and left to be a gofer and write speeches in politics; then on to serve in government", [4] then working for then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign before serving as campaign manager for former Administrator of the Small Business Administration Howard J. Samuels's failed 1974 gubernatorial campaign. From 1971 to 1974, he also served as the first executive director of the now-defunct New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation under the aegis of Samuels (who was concurrently appointed as the Corporation's chairman).
After Samuels's defeat, Auletta became a daily reporter for the New York Post in 1974. [4] Following that, he was a writer for The Village Voice , [4] and a politics writer at New York. [4] He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1977, [5] [6] writing a two-part article on New York City Mayor Ed Koch in 1978. He also wrote a weekly political column for the New York Daily News and was a political commentator on WCBS-TV. In 1986, he received the Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers. [7] He was the guest editor of the 2002 edition of The Best Business Stories of the Year.
Auletta started writing the "Annals of Communications" profiles for The New Yorker in 1992. [6] His 2001 profile of Ted Turner, "The Lost Tycoon", won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. [8] He is the author of twelve books, his first being The Streets Were Paved With Gold (1979). His other books include The Underclass (1983), Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of The House of Lehman (1986), Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way (1991), The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway (1997), and World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies (2001). His book Backstory: Inside the Business of News (2003) is a collection of his columns from The New Yorker. Five of his first 11 books were national bestsellers, including Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (2009).
In late 2014 he published a profile of Elizabeth Holmes and the company she founded, Theranos. While largely uncritical, the profile did note an absence of clinical tests and peer-reviewed studies supporting Theranos' alleged scientific innovations; it also characterized Holmes' explanation of the Theranos blood-testing process as "comically vague". [9] Former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou has credited Auletta's profile for stimulating his initial interest in Theranos. [10]
His twelfth book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else), was published in 2018. It described how advertising and marketing, with worldwide spending of up to $2 trillion, and without the subsidies of which most media, including Google and Facebook, would eventually perish, being already a victim of disruption.
He published his thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, a biography of former entertainment mogul and convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein, 2022. [11] [12]
Auletta was among the first to popularize the idea of the so-called "information superhighway" with his February 22, 1993, New Yorker profile of Barry Diller, in which he described how Diller used his Apple PowerBook to anticipate the advent of the Internet and our digital future. He has profiled the leading figures and companies of the Information Age, including Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, Sheryl Sandberg, Rupert Murdoch, John Malone, and the New York Times .
Auletta has been named a Library Lion Honoree by the New York Public Library. [13] He has won numerous journalism awards, and was selected as one of the twentieth century's top one hundred business journalists. He has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror, and for four decades has been a judge of the annual national Livingston Award for young journalists. He has twice served as a board member of International PEN, and was a longtime trustee and member of the Executive Committee of The Public Theater / New York Shakespeare Festival. Auletta is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Before October 2021, Auletta had an apartment on Lenox Hill in Manhattan with his wife, Amanda "Binky" Urban, a literary agent.[ citation needed ] As of 2013, the couple also owned a house in Bridgehampton, New York. [14] They have a daughter.[ citation needed ]
On 11 September 1995, Auletta was satirized as "Ken Fellata" in The New Republic by Jacob Weisberg and later New Yorker colleague Malcolm Gladwell. [15] [16] [17]
Auletta is a commentator in Where's My Roy Cohn?
David Boies is an American lawyer and chairman of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP. Boies rose to national prominence for three major cases: leading the U.S. federal government's successful prosecution of Microsoft in United States v. Microsoft Corp., his unsuccessful representation of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, and for successful representation of the plaintiff in Hollingsworth v. Perry, which invalidated California Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. Boies has also represented various clients in US lawsuits, including Theranos, tobacco companies, Harvey Weinstein, and Jeffrey Epstein's victims including Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
Bertram Harris Fields was an American lawyer noted for his work in the field of entertainment law. He represented many of the leading film studios, as well as numerous celebrities, and lectured at both Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. Fields was also a musician and an author of both fiction and non-fiction books.
The Wall Street Journal is an American business and economic-focused international daily newspaper based in New York City. The Journal is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp. The newspaper is published in broadsheet format and online. The Journal has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8, 1889, and is regarded as a newspaper of record, particularly in terms of business and financial news. The newspaper has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes, the most recent in 2023.
Christina Hambley Brown, Lady Evans, is an English journalist, magazine editor, columnist, broadcaster, and author. She is the former editor in chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast. From 1998 to 2002, Brown was chairman of Talk Media, which included Talk Magazine and Talk Miramax Books. In 2010, she founded Women in the World, a live journalism platform to elevate the voices of women globally, with summits held through 2019. Brown is author of The Diana Chronicles (2007), The Vanity Fair Diaries (2017) and The Palace Papers (2022).
The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class.
Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow is an American journalist. The son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen, he is known for his investigative reporting on allegations of sexual abuse against film producer Harvey Weinstein, which was published in The New Yorker magazine. The magazine won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for this reporting, sharing the award with The New York Times. Farrow has worked for UNICEF and as a government advisor.
Henry McKelvey Blodget is an American businessman, investor and journalist. He is notable for his former career as an equity research analyst who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch during the dot-com era. Due to his violations of securities laws and subsequent civil trial conviction, Blodget is permanently banned from involvement in the securities industry. Blodget was the CEO of Business Insider.
Harvey Weinstein is an American convicted sex offender and former film producer. He and his brother, Bob Weinstein, co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); The Crying Game (1992); Pulp Fiction (1994); Heavenly Creatures (1994); Flirting with Disaster (1996); and Shakespeare in Love (1998). Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love and also won seven Tony Awards for plays and musicals including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company (TWC), a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017.
Jonathan Coleman is an American author of literary nonfiction living in New York City.
Georgina Rose Chapman is an English fashion designer and actress. She was a regular cast member on Project Runway All Stars and, together with Keren Craig, is a co-founder of the fashion label Marchesa. Chapman was married to film producer Harvey Weinstein before leaving him in 2017 in the wake of allegations of sexual abuse against him.
Jodi Kantor is an American journalist. She is a New York Times correspondent whose work has covered the workplace, technology, and gender. She has been the paper's Arts & Leisure editor and covered two presidential campaigns, chronicling the transformation of Barack and Michelle Obama into the President and First Lady of the United States. Kantor was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her reporting on sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein.
Boies Schiller Flexner LLP is an American law firm based in New York City. The firm was founded by David Boies and Jonathan D. Schiller, in 1997, who, in 1999, were joined by Donald L. Flexner, former partner with Crowell & Moring, then forming Boies, Schiller & Flexner.
George Pratt Shultz was an American economist, businessman, diplomat and statesman. He served in various positions under two different Republican presidents and is one of the only two persons to have held four different Cabinet-level posts, the other being Elliot Richardson. Shultz played a major role in shaping the foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration and advancing the lies used to defraud investors in Theranos.
Googled: The End of the World as We Know It is a book published in 2009 by American writer, journalist and media critic Ken Auletta. It examines the evolution of Google as a company, its philosophy, business ethics, future plans and impact on society, the world of business and the Internet.
Theranos Inc. was an American privately held corporation that was touted as a breakthrough health technology company. Founded in 2003 by 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014. The company claimed that it had devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and that could be performed rapidly and accurately, all using compact automated devices which the company had developed. These claims were proven to be false.
Elizabeth Anne Holmes is an American former biotechnology entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud in connection to her blood-testing company, Theranos. The company's valuation soared after it claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that needed only very small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick. In 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company. In the following year, as revelations of potential fraud about Theranos's claims began to surface, Forbes revised its estimate of Holmes's net worth to zero, and Fortune named her in its feature article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders".
John Carreyrou is a French-American investigative reporter at The New York Times. Carreyrou worked for The Wall Street Journal for 20 years between 1999 and 2019 and has been based in Brussels, Paris, and New York City. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice and is well known for having exposed the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in The Wall Street Journal.
In October 2017, The New York Times and The New Yorker reported that dozens of women had accused film producer Harvey Weinstein of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse over a period of at least 30 years. Over 80 women in the film industry eventually accused Weinstein of such acts. Weinstein himself denied "any non-consensual sex". Shortly after, he was dismissed from The Weinstein Company (TWC), expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other professional associations, and retired from public view.
Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani is a businessman, former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, which was a privately held health technology company founded by his then-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes. He and Holmes fraudulently represented that they had devised a revolutionary blood test that required only small amounts of blood, such as from a fingerstick. Both Balwani and Holmes were convicted of fraud. The consequences of the fraud led to the collapse of Theranos and the loss of billions of dollars to investors.
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley is a 2019 American documentary film, directed and produced by Alex Gibney. The film revolves around Elizabeth Holmes and her former company Theranos. It is considered a companion piece to the book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
Hollywood Ending by Ken Auletta (Penguin Press, $30.00; ISBN 9781984878373).
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