Maharishi Arianna: Atop AOL, hiring and borrowing freely from the old media, a new age news guru is building her grandest temple
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On a recent Sunday afternoon, ÂArianna Huffington, the 61-year-old editorial director of the newly merged AOL-Huffington Post, gathers a group of children around her on a white rug, reading a series of stories. Her outfit—tuxedo jacket, sensible pants, hair lightened to the color of Donald Trump’s and with a similarly distinctive swirl—is a little more formal than the event, a spa open to the public, calls for today, but in every other way this “oasis,” as she puts it, is a reflection of Huffington’s habits: a “cell-phone check” at a concierge desk (a sign encourages guests to “give your phone a boost while you unplug inside”), blue yoga mats rolled up in a bin (“I do yoga every morning”), a chef making smoothies with names like You’ve Got the Beet, and a buffet with Greek yogurt—“the best in the world,” she explains, pushing it forward. “Eat. My mother used to say if you didn’t eat every twenty minutes, there was something wrong with you.”
Even the books that Huffington has selected for her reading session mirror her adult concerns—there’sGoodnight Moon; Stop Snoring, Bernard!;and a heap of others on the theme of sleep, a topic on which she can hold forth at length (and, indeed, she encourages her writers to file stories on sleep, such as “What Your Sleep Position Says About You” and “The Lost Art of Dreaming”). “Since I moved from L.A., I find the noise of New York City is great during the day, but it’s difficult to disconnect,” she says. “Sometimes, I have to sleep with my Bose headphones on.” She’s never taken sleeping pills and conks out on planes as long as she has “my kit, my socks, my music, which comes from MTV founder Tom Freston—he has made me the best playÂlist, which gives me so much joy.”
Huffington turns her considerable charisma on the children at her feet. “Who likes to nap?” she asks. “You know, in the AOL-Huffington Post offices we have two nap rooms, and grown-up people like me can even go in in the middle of the day and take a nap, and then they can come out recharged and ready to play hard.”
The kids look confused.
“Tell me, why do you like to go to sleep?” she says, turning to a curly-Âheaded kid in a sweatshirt.
“Because I can dream that I’m in a magical land,” he says.
“And what’s in that magical land?” asks Huffington.
“Happy stuff!”
“Fantastic,” she says, smiling widely. “I think we should all do that tonight—dream of a magical land with happy stuff.”