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. His father Pat was a sporting goods store owner and founder of the Coney Island Sports League who was responsible for discovering Sandy Koufax, a young baseball pitcher playing in the league who went on to have a Hall of Fame career with the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers after Pat urged the team to take a "look at this kid Koufax." [3]
Auletta attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island. [4] 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. [5]
While in graduate school, Auletta taught and trained Peace Corps volunteers. [6] 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", [5] 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. [5] Following that, he was a writer for The Village Voice , [5] and a politics writer at New York. [5] He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1977, [7] [8] 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. [9] 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. [8] His 2001 profile of Ted Turner, "The Lost Tycoon", won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. [10] 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". [11] Former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou has credited Auletta's profile for stimulating his initial interest in Theranos. [12]
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. [13] [14]
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. [15] 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. [16] 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. [17] [18] [19]
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.
Nicholson Baker is an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. His early novels such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were distinguished by their minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Out of a total of ten novels, three are erotica: Vox, The Fermata and House of Holes.
Richard Marco Kovacevich is an American business executive and the former CEO of Wells Fargo & Company.
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. This group is usually considered cut off from the rest of the society.
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 sexual abuse allegations 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.
Harvey Weinstein is an American former film producer and convicted sex offender. In 1979, Weinstein 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.
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 conservative foreign policy thought thereafter.
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.
Elizabeth Anne Holmes is an American 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 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.
Jean Riboud was a French socialist, corporate executive and the chairman of Schlumberger, the largest oilfield services company in the world. He was a member of the French Resistance during World War II and suffered incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp of the Nazis. His contributions were reported in making Schlumberger into the market leader in oilfield services sector. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 1986, for his contributions to society.
In October 2017, The New York Times and The New Yorker reported that dozens of women had accused the American 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.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is a nonfiction book by journalist John Carreyrou, released May 21, 2018. It covers the rise and fall of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup headed by Elizabeth Holmes. The book received critical acclaim, winning the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
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.
Channing Rex Robertson is a professor emeritus of chemical engineering at Stanford University. He held multiple significant roles at startup Theranos, founded by his student Elizabeth Holmes. Robertson took on major responsibilities at the company prior to its collapse, including becoming its first board member, engaging with venture capitalists, and recruiting biochemist Ian Gibbons. He retired from Stanford in 2012, becoming professor emeritus. Theranos named him the co-leader of their technology advisory board in 2017. He was called as a witness in United States v. Elizabeth A. Holmes, et al., which convicted Holmes and partner Sunny Balwani of criminal fraud. During his time working for Holmes, Robertson was paid US$500,000 per year by Theranos. Since his active role in the Theranos scandal, he went back to teach one course at Stanford.
The Dropout is an American true crime podcast hosted by Rebecca Jarvis that follows the story of Elizabeth Holmes, her defunct medical company Theranos, and the related federal criminal fraud trial, United States v. Elizabeth A. Holmes, et al. It was produced by ABC News, Taylor Dunn, Victoria Thompson, and Rebecca Jarvis. After the initial six episodes of the podcast aired in 2019, a two-hour 20/20 episode premiered in March 2019, following the popularity of the podcast. A second season of the podcast, titled, The Dropout: Elizabeth Holmes on Trial, debuted in 2022 and followed along with the criminal fraud federal trial of Holmes.
Hollywood Ending by Ken Auletta (Penguin Press, $30.00; ISBN 9781984878373).
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