Arianna Huffington, Prophet and Profiteer
The revolution is coming, and it is going to leave you rested and relaxed. The barricades you and I are going to storm, shoulder to shoulder, were thrown up by our relentless workaday lives, by the evil empire of stress, by the despotic tech monarchy whose foot soldiers are sleek devices beeping and dinging us into mindless compliance. We will break out of the Dickensian debtor’s prison that is the modern American existence, take a deep, chakra-cleansing breath and discover that our body fat has dropped to 18 percent, which is good if not great.
This revolution, already underway, is led by a sexagenarian entrepreneur named Arianna Huffington, she of that online bazaar of regurgitated news, amateur blogging, corporate puffery and celebrity side-boob pics that bears her name. Having stepped away from The Huffington Post earlier this year, she has started Thrive Global, a wellness website that went live on the last day of November with indispensable life advice from the likes of actor Ashton Kutcher (“I Don’t Bring My Phone Into the Bedroom”) and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (“Why Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Is Good for Amazon Shareholders”). You can also take an online wellness course, which features “instructors” like Kobe Bryant. As far as that goes, the website anticipates, and answers, a rather obvious question: “What do Arianna Huffington and Kobe Bryant have in common? They are both meditators, and they both value the power of sleep.” OK, then. I’m enrolling as soon as I finish my course work at Trump University.
